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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,...