Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood - (Palgrave Gothic) by Aspasia Stephanou (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood examines the promiscuous circulations of blood in science and philosophy, vampire novels, films and vampire communities to draw a vascular map of the symbolic meanings of blood and its association with questions of identity and the body. Stephanou seeks to explain present-day biotechnologies, global neoliberal biopolitics and capitalism, feminine disease and monstrosity, race, and vampirism by looking to the past and analysing how blood was constituted historically. By tracing the transformations of blood symbols and metaphors, as they bleed from early modernity into the complex arterial networks of global and corporate culture, it is possible to open new veins of signification in the otherwise exhausted and dry landscape of vampire scholarship"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.