Vampire Tales

Many readers believe that vampires began with Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), although some may have heard of earlier stories such as John William Polidori's 'The Vampyre' and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Carmilla'. This edition explores the extraordinary rich variety of vampire tales in the nineteenth century. 'The pang of the bite, the sudden spurting of blood, and the monstrous horror of the act.' This collection, edited by Nick Groom, explores the extraordinary variety and range of the vampire in English literature prior to the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897): it includes classical and mediaeval vampires, Islamic and Caribbean vampires, aristocratic and penurious vampires, abject vampires and dandified vampires, erudite vampires and bestial vampires, invisible vampires and psychic vampires, and, of course, she-vampires. While Dracula remains the touchstone not only of the English literary vampire but of the international vampire phenomenon in the cinema, on television, on the stage, in comics, in videogames, in music, and in fashion, readers may well be surprised to discover that there is an abundant tradition of vampire literature before Stoker's iconic novel. Moreover, these earlier vampires are often very different to those portrayed in Dracula: vampires were atypical beings-at least until the advent of the Count. Although there are familiar names among the twenty-five pieces collected here such as Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ambrose Bierce, there are also many less familiar writers, and so neglected classics from the United States, Australia, and, in translation, France and Germany, are also included. These encompass major cultural movements from Romantic Hellenism to late-Victorian Decadence, as well…