Our vampires, ourselves /

Auerbach (Univ. of Pennsylvania) provides an intriguing study divided into four principal divisions, two on 19th-century English vampires and Dracula, two on America's "Twentieth-Century Undeaths" and the Reagan years. The theme--that vampires are "personifications of their age" and adaptive to "personal and national moods" in an "evolving myth" with its range of iconography--is illustrated through drama, poetry, fiction, and film from a wide and persuasive view. Romantic vampirism was marked by disembodiment and the larger self, compared to the "dream of intimacy" that becomes corporeal and individualized in Carmilla and Christabel. Their literary successors blended power and propriety, while the transformative, isolated vampire at century's turn epitomized "heightened life." The 20th century has psychic vampires, who in the 1980s the author sees as "paragons of emotional complexity and discernment." But with "the diffused authority of American democracy" came generic reversions to a more authentic past, culminating in the "ornamental self-enclosure" or Rice's alternate society. Auerbach's excellent commentaries are self-contained, not always requiring the context of a thematic framework. This intelligently revisionist study, free of agenda, is unforced, sophisticated, and never reductive. It is recommended to a serious readership at the upper-division undergraduate level and above. L. K. MacKendrick University of Windsor

Literary scholar and vampire enthusiast Auerbach (Forbidden Journeys, LJ 4/15/92) poses this book as a history of the Anglo-American culture through its ever-changing vampires. Tracing the evolution of vampires from 19th-century England through 20th-century America, Auerbach makes a number of new and interesting observations that will undoubtedly spur future scholarly discourse on vampirology. From depictions of vampires by Lord Byron down to those of Stephen King and Anne Rice and their various adaptations throughout literature or film, Auerbach illustrates how vampires are personifications of their age, reflecting and embodying social, political, and cultural change. Auerbach's interjections of personal and political points of view may raise questions about objectivity, but her compelling assertions definitely whet the appetite for further exploration and analysis of vampires and culture. Recommended for most public libraries.-Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A vigorous, witty look at the undead as cultural icons in 19th- and 20th-century England and America. Though vampires haven't lacked fans or literary chroniclers, they too often thirst for intelligent appreciators: Most foragers in the vampirical vein are mere sensationalists. Not so Auerbach (English/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Communities of Women, 1978, etc.). Here she offers a challenging and mercifully succinct survey of the roles vampires have assumed in English and American society by examining novels, plays, and films in which they've figured. ``There is no such creature as `The Vampire,' '' the author argues, praising their ``supreme adaptability'' to an ever-changing body politic. Likewise, this historian of the bloodthirsty shows a remarkable dexterity herself in appraising the vampire in his/her full mutabilityfrom Dracula's chosen style of ``lonely rigidity,'' which in Auerbach's view ``repudiates the homoerotic intimacy with which earlier vampires had insinuated themselves into mortality,'' to the lesbian ``guardian angel'' school of vampirism alive in Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories, where bloodsucking and the black arts are ``purged of aggression'' and instead celebrate ``empathy'' among women. The book is highly browsable: Oscar Wilde fanciers will gravitate to Auerbach's fascinating equation of Draculaism with the lot of ``the fallen Wilde, a monster of silence and exile''; movie buffs will head for her extended discussion of John Badham's Dracula (1979); and feminists should pay particular attention to the scholar's reclamation of this traditionally male ``horror'' genre territorya reclamation made with brio yet due caution. One could wish for a more thoroughgoing reckoning of the impact and implications of the TV soap opera Dark Shadows. And the introduction leans in a personal direction that could (but does not) fruitfully inform the more straightforwardly lit-critical writing that follows. There's little reason to quibble, however, over this smart and snappy scholarly adventure story.