The all-seeing mirror: reflecting on vampires as allegories in socio-culturally sensitive literary works

Abstract

The present work aims at looking at the figure of the vampire in literature as powerful means of reading and interpreting the fears and anxieties of a specific socio-cultural space. By looking at the evolution of the literary vampire through the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we are able to notice that each of its incarnations dramatically differs from the previous one, and as vampires are reinvented, they engage in a coherent dialog with issues pertaining to their times, in a way that they never lose their relevance. Their heterogeneous existence, explicited in the dissertation primarily through Sheridan LeFanu s Carmilla, Bram Stoker s Dracula, Richard Matheson s I am Legend, Anne Rice s Interview with the Vampire and Octavia Butler s Fledgling, and the different theoretical questions brought on by each of them such as sexuality, alterity and hybridity will lead us to the understanding that the vampire may potentially function as a powerful allegory as it becomes a mirror of the very humanity on which its life depends