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Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. 238. $22.00.
Nina Auerbach's latest book blends literary analysis of vampire texts with a cultural reading of how vampirism infects our thoughts. Our Vampires, Ourselves offers a critical, and largely chronological, survey of vampire stories, beginning with a comparison of Byron's 1816 fragmentary tale introducing the vampire figure and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) and ending with Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 film Near Dark. Yet it would be a mistake to view Our Vampires, Ourselves as being only a history of vampires in literature, for it is at the same time "a history of Anglo-American culture through its mutating vampires" (1). This book is a fascinating and appealing historical study that is also a model of engaging cultural criticism.
Auerbach posits "that vampirism springs not only from paranoia, xenophobia, or immortal longings, but from generosity and shared enthusiasm": her own excitement concerning the subject motivates her argument (vii). The four textual chapters of Our Vampires, Ourselves are arranged according to a loose historical and typological chronology and focus on developing cultural paradigms of the vampire. There is a brief and personalized introduction that sets out the cultural issues to be analyzed, followed by the first chapter, which considers Romantic conventions regarding marriage and friendship in relation to various nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional, theatrical, and film texts figuring the vampire as an intimate. The second chapter pivots around a discussion of Bram Stoker's Dracula comparing that work to F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu as a version of the animalistic Dracula. In her third chapter, Auerbach traces the various transmutations of psychic vampirism in fiction contemporary with and following Stoker's novel, including work by Stephen King and Anne Rice, and popular films, ranging from Todd Browning's, starring Bela Lugosi, to the Hammer films with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. The fourth chapter ambitiously charts out how the promise embodied in 1970s vampires gives way to the "depressed creatures" of the Reagan years (165). By examining how contemporary vampires are represented as typically dysfunctional, Auerbach convincingly demonstrates how horror stories reproduce and refract cultural tensions.
Auerbach's first chapter lays the groundwork for her argument by delineating the relationship between Byron and Polidori and analyzing the male...