This revised and expanded edition of the 1978 classic brings Vampyres up to date with twenty-first-century vampire literature, including new text extracts, commentary, and a revised introduction. It incorporates extracts from a huge range of sources-from Bram Stoker's detailed research notes for Dracula to penny dreadfuls, to Angela Carter's The Bloody Chambe r (new to this edition) which is analyzed by the author in a broader cultural context. In this way, even Dracula, the evil one, is saved.An expanded, fully illustrated, and up-to-date edition of the classic cultural history of vampires Vampyres is a comprehensive and generously illustrated history and anthology of vampires in literature, from the folklore of eastern Europe to the Romantics and beyond. Thus Mina rejoices even when Dracula, the villain of the novel, has his soul released from his terrible body. The novel seems to argue that, in order to continue the normal biotic processes of living and dying, and the normal, moral, "Christian" processes of death and resurrection, undeadness must be eliminated. The body becomes a parasite, eking out an existence stolen from the vital energy of others. But in the case of undeadness, the living body seems almost to die, but maintains a kind of purgatorial state in which it feasts on the blood of the living, and the soul, trapped inside, cannot abide with God in heaven. In the former, the soul is given immortal life in heaven, in nearness to God, once it has been released from the earthly body, which passes from living to dying. Interestingly, undeadness seems to diametrically oppose the Christian notions of resurrection, or life after death. Renfield wishes to gain the special knowledge of undeadness from Dracula, but is eventually killed by his would-be master. Renfield is obsessed with the life-giving energies of the animals he eats-flies, spider, birds, cats-and these animals must die to give him life. Both Harker and Van Helsing appear to go gray and age as the book progresses-they near death, physically, as they endanger their lives, and only once Dracula is fully killed do they regain their total health. Lucy's sleepwalking, too, is an "in-between state," not waking and not sleeping, which allows Dracula to find her, bite her, and eventually make her a vampire. This "in-between" hypnotic state is a kind of undeadness. Mina, then, is hypnotized by Van Helsing, later on, to provide information on Dracula's whereabouts.
DRACULA RESURRECTION INTRO FULL
Harker's swoon, upon leaving Dracula's castle, nearly kills him, and he spends many months regaining his full health, only to find that Mina has been afflicted by Dracula's bite. Other characters in the novel hover between these categories of living and dying.
DRACULA RESURRECTION INTRO FREE
In this sense, to kill Dracula is to allow him to live-to free his soul from the prison of his body. He sleeps during the day and lives at night he is of incredible strength when awake, but must be invited into one's room in order to begin his "seduction." But the touchstone of Dracula's undeadness is his inability actually to die-his soul is trapped in a kind of prison, and must be released by the cutting off of Dracula's head, or the driving of a wooden stake through his heart. All the above lead into the final, and perhaps most important, theme of the novel: that of the relationship between life, death, and the state in between these two, known by Van Helsing as "undeadness." Dracula is a creature of the undead.
0 kommentar(er)
