Brodman, Barbara and James E. Doan, eds.: The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of the Legend.

Santos, Cristina

Brodman, Barbara and James E. Doan, eds. The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of the Legend. Madison: Fareleigh Dickinson UP, 2013. 249 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-61147-580-7. $72.00.

The editors of The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of the Legend, Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan, have brought together a substantial collection of sixteen chapters seeking to explore the universality and/or archetypal figure of the Western vampire. The edited volume is divided into four sections that trace the development and genesis of the western vampire using mythical, legendary, folkloric, and even medical explanations. The uniting premises of all four sections are clearly established by the editors in their introduction, which underscores the transformations and retransformations of the figure of the vampire throughout history and various cultures and looks to science for possible sources of vampirism and its links to lycanthropy. This collection is one of the most comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and well-written collections on the topic so far and succeeds in bringing together innovative research that is both specifically focused and extensive and wide-ranging as it provides updated scholarship on the ever-so elusive vampire figure.

Part One to the volume, "The Western Vampire: From Draugr to Dracula," establishes a historical foundation of the literary tradition of the vampire figure linking Norse draugr narratives, fourteenth-century saga literature, to Western literary embodiments of the same. Matthias Teichert opens the collection with "'Draugula': The Draugr in Old Norse-Icelandic Saga Literature and His Relationship to the Post-Medieval Vampire Myth," a well-written chapter clearly outlining similarities between vampires, revenants, and psychic vampires, as well as providing detailed lists of characteristics of both the draugr and vampire. Paul E. H. Davis's contribution, "Dracula Anticipated: The 'Undead' in Anglo-Irish Literature," has a political focus (agrarian reform) in examining the "Undead" as an embodiment of societal fears and fantasies in Anglo-Irish literature. Meanwhile Alexis M. Milmine looks at Bram Stoker's Dracula in "Retracing the Shambling Steps of the Undead: The Blended Folkloric Elements of Vampirism in Bram Stoker's Dracula" as an example of the vampire figure as scapegoat for death and pestilence as well as society's fear of death. The last essay of Part One by Cristina Artenie, "Dracula's Kitchen: A Glossary of Transylvanian Cuisine, Language, and Ethnography," focuses on the cultural confusion and prejudice surrounding Transylvanian people and folklore where "in the battlefield of literature and literary studies, Transylvania is still being colonized" (55).

In Part Two, "Medical Explanations for the Vampire," the chapters provide a much-needed exploration of the medical reasons behind the genesis of vampirism and its links to and similarities with lycanthropy. The section addresses both the historical background of the vampire having been used as a scapegoat for occurrences of various diseases such as the plague and psychiatric maladies, as well as less ubiquitous medical and scientific explanations for vampirism. Edward O. Keith's contribution, "Biomedical Origins of Vampirism," asserts the importance of differentiating among the vampire in folklore, medical vampirism, the literary vampire, and the myth of the vampire. Keith also provides the reader with an excellent breakdown and description of four medical "causes" of vampirism as well as werewolfism in some cases linked to hematophagy. This chapter is followed by Leo Ruickbie's case study of an eighteenth-century vampire epidemic, "Evidence for the Undead: The Role of Medical Investigation in the 18th-Century Vampire Epidemic." The third and final chapter in Part Two, Clemens Ruthner's "Undead Feedback: Adaptations and Echoes of Johann Fluckinger's Report, Visum et Repertum (1732), until the Millennium," charts the image of the vampire as a fantastic and liminal transgressor with a focus on literary and cultural studies wherein cultural "foreigners" are seen as the source of contagion.

Parallel to the use of the vampire as the scapegoat for disease and death, the figure of the female vampire can be linked to the societal angst over infant deaths and the role of the mother in these premature deaths. In modern culture, the female vampire figure has been glamorized because of her suspected lesbianism and nymphomaniacy. In Part Three, "The Female Vampire in World Myth and the Arts," this volume (thankfully) goes beyond these patriarchal fantasies to focus rather on the impact of feminism and cultural studies on the modern depictions of these monstrous female figures--ranging, as per the title of Nancy Schumann's contribution, "Women with Bite: Tracing Vampire Women from Lilith to Twilight," from the ancient to the contemporary. Links to vampirism are also explored in relation to women who died in childbirth, mythical figures such as the succubus and, as discussed by James E. Doan in "The Vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican Lore," to goddesses such as the Mexican Cihuacoatl who insisted on human sacrifice to ensure the fertility of the land and its peoples--enforcing the idea that "blood is life." Further, Angela Tumini proposes in "Vampiresse: Embodiment of Sensuality and Erotic Horror in Carl Th. Dreyer's Vampyr and Mario Bava's The Mask of Satan" that female vampires are doubly monstrous within patriarchy because of fears of the fluid and erotically ambiguous female body together with the dread of female empowerment. If blood is a crucial component to the discussion of the vampire, its importance is heightened still further when considering the female vampire figure, whose fanged mouth and alluring sexuality combine in the myth of the vagina dentata capable of not only of draining men of their blood but of their virility as well. Katherine Allocco in her essay "Vampiric Viragoes: Villainizing and Sexualizing Arthurian Women in Dracula vs. King Arthur (2005)" highlights these gendered power relations wherein empowered women who transgress social norms are depicted as vampiric. Although Allocco may be referencing what could be an obscure film for some, the arguments made around the conceptualization of vampiric viragoes furthers vampire studies by developing a link between female sexuality and its representation as monstrous (vampiric in this case) when it deviates from the patriarchal norm. Part Three is then completed by Jamieson Ridenhour's contribution, "'If I Wasn't a Girl, Would You Like Me Anyway?' Le Fanu's Carmilla and Alfredson's Let the Right One In," which delves into vampirism and homosexuality (predominantly lesbianism) from a perspective that does not privilege traditional heteronormativity.

The fourth and final part to The Universal Vampire, "Old and New World Manifestations of the Vampire," concludes this edited volume with essays demonstrating the breadth of the vampire myth as it manifests in Japan, Russia, and Mexico. Masaya Shimokusu's chapter, "A Cultural Dynasty of Beautiful Vampires: Japan's Acceptance, Modifications, and Adaptations of Vampires," provides an overview of the infiltration of vampire literature into Japan where the vampire in folklore did not previously exist, thereby illustrating the Westernization of Japan. Meanwhile, Thomas Jesus Garza explains in "From Russia with Blood: Imagining the Vampire in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture" that, in contemporary Russian popular culture, the vampire is the vilified Other and is used both to represent the influx of non-Russian culture as well as "real" monsters in Russia (such as corruption, gangs and drug trade). Garza also asserts, however, that the vampire in Russian pop culture is a nuanced symbol embodying both the desire for political freedom and a tendency toward self-criticism. In "Dracula Comes to Mexico: Carlos Fuentes's Vlad, Echoes of Origins, and the Return of Colonialism," Adriana Gordillo develops the concept of "myth tourism" in relation to the movement, reappropriation, and transformation of the vampire myth according to the context and needs of its socio-cultural environment. Gordillo, in effect, departs from the established generic function of the vampire existing between worlds--a liminal existence that is to be feared because of the ambiguity of life and death existing within the same being--by asserting that meaning of the vampire is, indeed, context dependent. Raul Rodriguez-Hernandez and Claudia Schaefer also address the ambiguity of the vampire in "Sublime Horror: Transparency, Melodrama, and the Mise-en-Scene of Two Mexican Vampire Films," which focuses on the Mexican films El vampiro and La invencion de Cronos.

This collection succeeds in pulling together a wide range of literary, historical, and cultural approaches to the dissemination of the vampire figure through myth, legend, folklore, literature, and the various arts. The reader comes away with a thorough vision of the adaptability of the vampire figure through the ages and through its different cultural embodiments. The vampire is indeed immoral because of its ability to "morph into new forms as each age rediscovers it" (xiii).