Academics Lament How Vampires in Modern Culture Are 'Losing Their British Passports'; Decaffeinated Version of Dracula
Here's another thing to worry about when it comes to vampires: How American they have become. Vampire experts gathered last month at the University of Hertfordshire, just north of London, at a conference titled "Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture." Its main objective? To fight back against the "Americanization" of the genre.
American television drama "True Blood" and novels like Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" saga have brought vampires out of the cultural graveyard and into the moonlight. The conference is the brainchild of Sam George, a lecturer in literature at the University of Hertfordshire.
Her call for papers caught the attention of more than 100 academics sending in abstracts, though only 70 were scheduled to talk. "I wanted to prove you can study popular literature in a serious way," she told participants as she announced her university's fall launch of a master's degree in "Reading the Vampire: Science, Sexuality and Alterity in Modern Culture," the first of its kind.
Dr. George added that both the Twilight saga—a series of four fantasy novels set in Washington state—and "True Blood," an HBO drama series set in a fictitious Louisiana town, have contributed to vampires in popular culture "losing their British passports and becoming Americanized."
"I have set up this conference driven by the desire to put the British vampire back on the map," said Dr. George, who also teaches literature from the Enlightenment, the 18th century and the Romantic period. "Vampires are enjoying a vogue at the moment. They seem to have become a poignant symbol of modern culture."
It's a sunny Friday afternoon in the English town of Hatfield and delegates at the conference are eagerly making their way into a dark auditorium to sink their teeth into the origins of vampires.
Later, they can be seen eating brownies and cakes out of a coffin and choosing from the dinner menu items like "deliciously blood-red soup, sucked from the veins of tortured tomatoes" or "vegetables, freshly dug from the grave of a murderer, brought to life with a sensual crimson dressing of tomato and basil."
Panelists heatedly discussed various topics ranging from "Undead, unwed, but not unread: vampire fiction and chick-lit," "Undead Victorians" and "Politics of the Undead" to "The Gay Undead" and "Bloody hell. Sodding, blimey, shagging, knickers, bollocks. Oh God, I'm English."
Dr. George, author of the book "Botany, Sexuality and Women's Writing 1760-1820: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant," highlighted how every decade treats vampires in its own way. In the 1980s, for example, vampires dealt with the subject of AIDS, and therefore talked about things that were still a taboo for society at the time, she says.
Irish writer Bram Stoker, author of the genre's key text, "Dracula," partly set his 1897 Gothic novel in England. Its protagonist, solicitor Jonathan Harker, travels from his native England to Count Dracula's remote castle near Transylvania, to help him move to Britain. While Dracula wasn't British, his real-estate agent and his preferred location for his home were. And he was squarely European.
But it was American author Anne Rice's glamorously tragic bloodsuckers of the 1970s and 1980s who gave the genre a fillip. Vampires were no longer the mold-scented monsters of Stoker's novel and early movies but highly intelligent, beautiful and fashionable creatures, with aristocratic manners, experts at the conference said.
"You cannot compare the modern vampire with the traditional figure of Dracula," said Andrés Romero of the University of Zaragoza in Spain.
"The vampire is no longer the reptilian-like figure, but it is even physically attractive." Vampires are "not threatening any more," he lamented, but have been assimilated by popular culture in their "decaffeinated version."
Others agree. Stacey Abbott, a senior lecturer in film and television at London's Roehampton University, says publishers and Hollywood studios have lifted the genre out of the niche market of horror and into the mainstream.
Stephenie Meyer's books, Dr. Abbott says, tap into many teenage anxieties and insecurities. "Bella [the book's main character] is often criticized because she is rather nondescript," Ms. Abbott says. "But this is a character audiences can identify with because she is awkward and doesn't think of herself as pretty, which is how a lot of teenage girls think about themselves."
But vampires never really went away, argues Marcus Sedgwick, who writes novels with a vampire twist for young adults. "They have always been popular but right now there are a lot of elements of vampire history that appeal to an audience in the modern world."
He says the undead have even clawed their way out of the pages of fantasy novels into the real world.
In England in 1974, a man who thought he was being tormented by vampires choked to death on garlic, Mr. Sedgwick recalls. And just five years ago in Romania, men were arrested for digging up a corpse they believed to be a vampire.
Said Mr. Sedgwick, "Reading about that material made me realized how connected we still are to the subject of death and the return from death."
No comments:
Post a Comment