Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction Blood Bank: A History of the Symbolics of Blood

   • Aspasia Stephanou

   Pages 1-20

3. A Matter of Life and Death: Transfusing Blood from a Supernatural Past to Scientific Modernity and Vampiric Technology

   • Aspasia Stephanou

   Pages 21-46

4. The Biopolitics of the Vampire Narrative: Vampire Epidemics, AIDS and Bioterrorism

   • Aspasia Stephanou

   Pages 47-73

5. ’ ‘Tis My Heart, Be Sure, She Eats for Her Food’: Female Consumptives and Female Consumers

   • Aspasia Stephanou

   Pages 74-98

6. ‘Race as Biology Is Fiction’: The Bad Blood of the Vampire

   • Aspasia Stephanou

   Pages 99-119

7. ‘The Sunset of Humankind Is the Dawn of the Blood Harvest’: Blood Banks, Synthetic Blood and Haemocommerce

   • Aspasia Stephanou

   Pages 120-137

8. ‘Many People Have Vampires in Their Blood’: ‘Real’ Vampire Communities

   • Aspasia Stephanou

   Pages 138-164

9. Conclusion The Blood of the Vampire: Globalisation, Resistance and the Sacred

   • Aspasia Stephanou

   Pages 165-172

10. Back Matter

    Pages 173-226

    PDF

Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood examines the manifestations of blood and vampires in various texts and contexts. It seeks to connect, through blood, fictional to real-life vampires to trace similarities, differences and discontinuities. These movements will be seen to parallel changing notions about embodiment and identity in culture.

• blood
• vampires
• identity
• body
• film
• literature
• symbolism
• gothic
• AIDS
• culture
• globalization
• Narrative
• technology

"This is a fascinating study of blood symbolism in a variety of vampiric contexts, which demonstrates an impressive breadth of cultural understanding from the medieval to the present day. The analysis of biomedicine and its relationship to a neoliberal political agenda is masterly. It is to the author's credit that they bring together so many diverse, but related, strands in such a convincing and intellectually exciting way. This is an important book for anyone interested in the political agendas of our age." - Dr Andrew Smith, Reader in Nineteenth Century English Literature, University of Sheffield and past president of the International Gothic Association

• Cyprus

  Aspasia Stephanou

Aspasia Stephanou recently completed her PhD at the University of Stirling, Scotland, where she was also a tutor. She is co-editor of Transgressions and Its Limits (with Matt Foley and Neil McRobert, 2012) and has published on race and the vampire, transgression and blood in contemporary performance art, globalisation and vampire communities, and Black Metal Theory in a range of international journals.

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