The vampire : a new history / Nick Groom.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Published to mark the bicentenary of John Polidori's publication of The Vampyre, Nick Groom's detailed new account illuminates the complex history of the iconic creature. The vampire first came to public prominence in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment science collided with Eastern European folklore and apparently verified outbreaks of vampirism, capturing the attention of medical researchers, political commentators, social theorists, theologians, and philosophers. Groom accordingly traces the vampire from its role as a monster embodying humankind's fears, to that of an unlikely hero for the marginalized and excluded in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literary and artistic representations, as well as medical, forensic, empirical, and sociopolitical perspectives, this rich and eerie history presents the vampire as a strikingly complex being that has been used to express the traumas and contradictions of the human condition.

Foreword -- A note on the etymology of the word vampire -- Introduction: Creating : thinking with vampires -- Part I. Circulating : the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unearthing the dead : medicine and detection, body and mind ; The lands of blood : place and race, territory and travel ; Ghostly theology : rational religion, spiritual reason ; The covenant of the undead : Catholicism and enlightenment, sanctity and danger -- Part II. Coagulating : the nineteenth century to the present. The cultures of death : Gothic romanticism, deathly words ; Mortal pathologies : being bestial, living lies ; Bleeding gold : Gothic capitalism and undead consumerism ; The Count, Dracula : smoke and mirrors - pen, paint and blood -- Conclusion: Crawling and creeping : living with vampires.

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