Vampire novel

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The vampire novel is a literary work that has vampires on the subject. These are usually vampires in the mythical sense (i.e. undead, blood-sucking beings), but there are also novels about "psychological vampires", ie people who believe they are vampires and behave like them. Vampire novels are traditionally often assigned to horror literature, but do not necessarily have to belong to this genre.

history

background

Horror tales and legends about beings who suck the blood from humans or animals have existed in all cultures at all times. The vampire belief plays an important role, especially in Slavic popular belief .

In the first half of the 18th century, Serbia (then part of the Habsburg monarchy) experienced an epidemic that could not be explained with medical knowledge at the time , which led to numerous deaths. During the exhumation of two dead people suspected of being vampires, Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole , the bodies were allegedly found not decomposed and with traces of blood on their mouths, whereupon they were staked. The spread of the incidents in the European press created a general "vampire hysteria".

Pre-romanticism

Later in the 18th century, when backlash against the Enlightenment , the fantasy and mysticism won artistic importance, so does the literature on the theme of the vampire began to work. Well-known examples:

romance

In the following Romantic Age , Novalis ( Hymns to the Night ), Heinrich Heine ( Helena , The Conjuration ), ETA Hoffmann ( Cyprian's story from: The Serapion Brothers ) and other poets took up the subject. The romantic interest in supernatural, "dark" and socially ostracized subjects such as dealing with evil contributed to this . The vampire theme stands for the fear of death and being buried alive, but also for repressed sexuality and eroticism. The longing for death cultivated in these artist circles made the vampire appear interesting as a projection surface, especially for the representatives of the so-called Black Romanticism .

In Anglo-Saxon literature, Lord Byron took up the theme in the poem The Giaur (1813) and in his unfinished story about the vampire August Darvell ("Fragment of a Novel", 1816), which was in literary competition with Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley originated. John Polidori , Byron's personal physician, took Byron's subject matter and published The Vampire in 1819 , the first major vampire short story in world literature. With the protagonist, the Byron-inspired vampire Lord Ruthven, Polidori also created the prototype of the modern “gentleman vampire”, which replaced the animal vampires of popular belief and earlier literature.

Nikolai Wassiljewitsch Gogol wrote the story Der Wij (1835) in the middle of the 19th century , which is closely based on traditional popular belief. Count Alexei Konstantinowitsch Tolstoy wrote very typical vampire stories with his short story Die Familie des Wurdalak (1839) and the short story The Vampire (1841).

1845-1847 published the penny booklet series "Penny Dreadfuls" the stories about "Varney the Vampire". In literary research, James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Perst are suspected to be the authors. The vampire Varney shows a further development of the literary figure: Varney is the first vampire who detests his vampire existence, but is at the mercy of his desires. The series was very successful and made vampire stories popular with a wide readership, but this also led to the fact that the figure of the vampire has since been assigned to trivial or trash literature .

Late 19th century

In 1872, Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was the first story about a female vampire, the beautiful vampire Carmilla, who terrorized a Styrian province for over a hundred years.

Inspired by Carmilla , Slavic folk tales, superstitions and possibly some historical figures such as B. Vlad III. Drăculea , the journalist Bram Stoker wrote the first novel about a vampire: Dracula (published in 1897), which is still considered the most widely read and best known vampire novel to this day. Count Dracula has become synonymous with the literary vampire type. For the first time, Stoker invents an equal opponent of the vampire for the novel: the Dutch scholar and vampire expert Professor Abraham van Helsing. The author thus contrasts the modern, scientifically oriented world with the archaic world of the mystical. When it appeared in the late 19th century, some passages in Dracula were considered morally objectionable, the first critics found clear indications of sexual practices that were taboo at the time, such as cunnilingus , in the figure of the Count .

20th century

Anglo-Saxon literature

The vampire novel was dominated by Anglo-American authors in the 20th century. A selection of important works:

  • 1954 I am Legend (German: I am legend , also: I, the last person ), a novel by the American writer Richard Matheson , which is about the last person in a world that consists only of vampires.
  • 1975 Salem's Lot (Eng. Salem must burn ), a novel by Stephen King , which transfers motifs from Dracula to a small town in Maine , USA , in the 20th century . The Dracula Tape , novel by Fred Saberhagen , the first novel from the perspective of a vampire.
  • 1976 Interview with the Vampire (published in German under various titles, first in 1978 as Die Schule der Vampire , today the book is available as a conversation with a vampire ). Anne Rice's novel . In 1985 the author continued the novel in the series The Vampire Chronicles (German: Chronicle of the Vampires ) with the book The Vampire Lestat (German: The Prince of Darkness ). The series is the most commercially and critically successful book series in the vampire genre of the 20th century.

Due to the box office successes of Francis Ford Coppola's " Bram Stoker's Dracula " and Neil Jordan's " Anne Rice's Interview With A Vampire ", the genre regained greater popularity at the end of the 20th century.

German literature

In 1979 the first volume of the children's book series Der kleine Vampir by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg was published . Since 1999, Wolfgang Hohlbein has been working on the not yet completed series Chronicle of the Immortals (Volume 1: Am Abgrund , 1999).

Russian literature

In the novels of the Guardian series (Volume 1: Guardians of the Night , 1998) by the Russian author Sergej Lukianenko , vampires appear as representatives of the “dark side”.

21st century

2005, the first novel was published Twilight (dt .: bite dawn ) of bis (s) book series by Stephenie Meyer to the vampire Edward and the high school student Bella Swan. The books are among the most successful vampire novels of the early 21st century to date. Other commercially successful series are the Darren Shan series by Darren O'Shaughnessy and the Vampire Diaries series by Lisa Jane Smith .

In 2008 the novel Un lieu incertain (Eng: The Forbidden Place ) was published, in which the French author Fred Vargas embeds the famous vampire case by Kisolova in her crime series about Commissioner Adamsberg.

In 2009 the novel Die Saat (Original: The Strain ) was published, the prelude to a trilogy (Volume 2: The Blood ) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan , in which a strange plague attacks New York, which turns out to be a vampire plague, but with typical superstitious as well as epidemiological characteristics (vector, course of disease). The end of the trilogy has not yet appeared.

The five-part book series Die Erben der Nacht , which was written by Ulrike Schweikert , is also well-known in German-speaking countries .

The depiction of the vampire in the novel

The first vampire tales portrayed vampires as bloodthirsty monsters or dangerous seducers to evil. Humans had to resist or fight them. In the later novels, the character of the vampire became increasingly complex and designed with correspondingly diverse character traits. In modern entertainment literature , the representation largely varies as follows:

  • Classic representation: vampires as dangerous opponents of humans
  • Mythologization : vampires as opponents of werewolves . Vampires as revenants or immortal people.
  • Humanization: Vampires with conscience and morals who live in coexistence or friendship with humans
  • Downplaying: vampires in children's stories. Vampires who no longer feed on human blood
  • Symbolism : The vampire often serves as a metaphor for communicable deadly diseases, sexually motivated crimes and manipulative influence of a single charismatic person on his fellow human beings

In the first literary stories, vampires appeared alone or in small groups. In modern works there are also vampire clans with numerous members who stick together according to common rules and often look back on a long history.

Dracula, protagonist from Bram Stoker's novel of the same name, is the model for most vampires. He reappears in numerous vampire novels. Essentially three types have emerged:

  • the caricature of a poor old Dracula who lives orphaned in a dilapidated crypt
  • the overpowering Dracula, who founded a powerful vampire clan
  • the rich Dracula, who comes from noble circumstances.

The typical characteristics of a vampire, which can largely be traced back to Bram Stoker's Dracula novels (vampires have no shadow and no reflection, they abhor crosses and garlic, they can transform into animals such as wolves and bats, etc.) are interpreted in many ways by modern authors and expanded, partly discarded and replaced by new inventions.

Vampire novels in modern fiction can be fantasy or science fiction novels as well as historical or present-day novels.

The vampire novels that are set in today's world often show vampires who have learned to make use of modern realities (e.g. they no longer suck blood from people, but consume it from blood donation bags or beverage cans) .

Literature (selection)

Series

Individual works

Anthologies

Four comprehensive collections of classic and recent vampire stories:

  • Dieter Sturm, Klaus Völker (ed.): From those vampires or people suckers. Seals and documents . Hanser, Munich 1968
  • Helmut Degner & Eva Luther (translator): Vampires. Anthology. Fackel, Olten 1969
  • Alan Ryan (Ed.): The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, London 1988
  • Arno Löb (ed.): Dracula's return . Vampire stories by German authors, Weitbrecht, 1996

Secondary literature

  • Paul Barber: Vampires, burial, and death. Folklore and reality . Yale University Press, New Heaven, Conn. 1988, ISBN 0-300-04126-8 .
  • Oliver Claes: Strangers, Vampires, Sexuality, Death and Art with Elfriede Jelinek and Adolf Muschg . Aisthesis Verlag , Bielefeld 1994, ISBN 3-89528-109-3 (plus dissertation, University of Paderborn 1994).
  • Basil Copper: The vampire in legend, art and reality ("The vampire in legend, art and fact"). Festa, Leipzig 2007, ISBN 978-3-86552-071-5 .
  • Winfried Freund : "The disenchanted vampire". On the parodic reception of Count Dracula by Hans Carl Artmann and Herbert Rosendorfer . In: Gerhard Köpf : Reception pragmatics. Contributions to the Practice of Reading ( UTB , 1026). Fink, Munich 1981, pp. 131-148
  • Klaus Hamberger: Mortuus non murders. Documents on Vampirism 1689-1791 . Turia & Kant, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-85132-025-5 .
  • Stefan Hock: The vampire sagas and their utilization in German literature (research on modern literary history; Vol. 17). Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1977, ISBN 3-8067-0607-7 (reprint of the Berlin 1900 edition).
  • Clive Leatherdale: Dracula, the novel & the Legend. A study of Bram Stoker 's gothic masterpiece . Desert Island Books, Brighton 1993, ISBN 1-87428-704-X
  • Ralf-Peter Märtin: Dracula. The life of Prince Vlad Țepeș. (Wagenbach's pocket book; vol. 396). Wagenbach, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-8031-2396-8
  • Hans Meurer: Vampires, the angels of darkness. The dark myth of blood, lust and death . Owl publishing house, Freiburg / B. 2001, ISBN 3-89102-460-6 .
  • Susanne Pütz: Vampires and their victims. The bloodsucker as a literary figure . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 1992, ISBN 3-925670-65-3 (plus dissertation, University of Bonn 1991).
  • Clemens Ruthner: Eerie return. Interpretations of the ghostly fictional characters in Ewers , Meyrink , Soyka , Spunda and Strobl (Studies on Fantastic Literature; Vol. 10). Corian, Meitingen 1993, ISBN 3-89048-119-1 (plus abstract of a diploma thesis, University of Vienna 1990).
  • Erwin Jänsch: The Vampire Lexicon, Vampires in Literature . SoSo, Augsburg, 1996, ISBN 3923914261

Web links

Wikisource: Vampire  sources and full texts

notes

  1. ^ 10 ores, including three German single editions by Simon Raven, Alexei Konstantinowitsch Tolstoi and Luigi Capuana