Crisis and Liminality in Irish and North American Vampire Stories: “Interviewing Contemporary Vampires”

Abstract

Over the course of time, the figure of the vampire has been associated to moments of individual, social, cultural and political crisis in the history of humanity. Sheridan LeFanu's "Carmilla" (1872) and Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (1892) are early examples which ghoticized fin-de-siècle cultural, social and political threats, such as the desintegration of British Empire fears of the industrial middle class or the progressive visibility of women in the public sphere. The vampire myth has to be understood as part of fin-de-siècle "monstrous" narratives which adress such cultural, social and political fears in terms of what Stephen Arata has called "reverse collonization" (1990), a response to cultural guilt which also entails powerful critiques of dominat ideologies. From this moment onwards, the figure of the vampire has been recurrently used to represent the most diverse fears and crisis in especially troubled and liminal times and circumstances. Taking as referents the classic Irish tales by Sheridan Le Fanu and by Bram Stoker, the aim of this dissertation is to examine the twenty- and twenty-first-century literary and cinematographic instances of the uses and functions of the trope of the vampire