Blood obsession
Subtitle: vampires, serial murder, and the popular imagination
By: Jörg Waltje.
Publisher: PETER LANG
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 157
Subjects: Vampires in literature.; Repetition in literature.; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism.; Vampire films -- History and criticism.; Serial murders.
Description: "What is it about vampires that fascinates the human imagination? Blood Obsession closely scrutinizes theories of Sigmund Freud and Tzvetan Todorov and arrives at a model of the vampire as the perfect representative of genre for a variety of reasons - the vampire figure appeals to its audience because of an interdependency of looplike mental and narrative structures that lure both reader and writer incessantly back to the genre. At the same time, this book provides the reader with a thorough survey of literary and filmic vampires in both adult and juvenile fictions. Lastly, it blends the realms of legal and literary history by highlighting the changes the image of the serial killer, a close relative of the vampire, underwent at the end of the twentieth century. Blood Obsession is a highly enlightening study for the general reader as well as for students of film, literature and popular music."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-152) and index.
Table of contents: title: The allure of repetition; title: Vampires, genre, and the compulsion to repeat; title: Literary vampires; title: Vampires, film, and myth; title: Childhood fears and teenage vampires; title: The mechanics of serial murder; title: Repetition revisited.