Blood Obsession: Vampires, Serial Murder, and the Popular Imagination

Jörg Waltje

PETER LANG, 2005 - Foreign Language Study - 157 pages

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 culture.

Contents

• Vampires Genre and the Compulsion: 11
• Literary Vampires Advent of: 29
• xi: 48

About the author

The Author: Jörg Waltje is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Director of the Language Resource Center at Ohio University, Athens. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to his work in film and literature he is also an expert on multimedia and wireless technologies in language instruction.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Blood Obsession: Vampires, Serial Murder, and the Popular Imagination; G - Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series
• Author: Jörg Waltje
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: PETER LANG, 2005
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Mar 27, 2008
• ISBN: 0820474207, 9780820474205
• Length: 157 pages
• Subjects: Foreign Language Study / English as a Second Language; Literary Criticism / American / General; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Horror & Supernatural; Literary Criticism / Modern / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Performing Arts / Film / General; Performing Arts / Film / Genres / Horror; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social; Social Science / Sociology / General; True Crime / Murder / Serial Killers