The Global Vampire: Essays on the Undead in Popular Culture Around the World - Paperback

by Cait Coker (Editor), Donald E. Palumbo (Editor), C. W. Sullivan III (Editor)

The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.

Author Biography

Cait Coker is associate professor and curator of rare books and manuscripts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on genre history, women's writing, and the history of women in publishing.