Little Girls and Psychic Fiends: Nabokov's Lolita as Vampire Tale

2022

In the 19th century particularly, the usage of the vampire in the Gothic novel was increasingly prominent as fin-de-siecle anxieties intensified. Politically speaking the New Woman was a symbol of anarchic hysteria since she threatened male control. The New Woman was characterised by her education, pursuing academic growth, being sexually independent. The three focuses of analysis for this research are Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Le Fanu, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker and The Blood of the Vampire (1897) by Florence Marryat. The main objective of this study is to see the historical contextualisation of gender politics and female sexuality in the reflection of the vampire figure. In each text the representation of the female vampire demonstrates the conceptualization of gender and identity, the issues around inequity, social interactions, beliefs around the body, gender, and sociocultural stereotypes. The vampire metaphor is used as a key figure to address the discrepancies surrounding gender norms and how these norms reinforced cultural expectations of what it meant to be a man and a woman.

Three women writers, Elisabeth Kostova, Doina Ruști, and Ruxandra Ivăncescu chose the vampire motif as the core of their historiographical metafiction. The principle of verisimilitude that dominates their prose writing in different percentages, transforms the narrative strategy into an initiation journey for interpreting various traces left behind by a mysterious character. They are blending into their prose writing historic archival facts, popular knowledge embedded in folktales and ballads, as well as important artifacts. As requested by the literary convention, their vampire becomes a time traveler, interested in maintaining power and offering protection to a few ones, a more intellectual and at times a good-natured character, stripped of his sensuality.

REDEN, 2022

Anna Marta Marini: Given your body of work, I would like to start by asking you: how has the Gothic used bodies to express the crossing of boundaries, to express othering, abjection, fantasy, repulsion, mores, urges, and all sorts of anxieties related to corporal reality? Do you think there is an element of fascination as well, intrinsic to the Gothic exploitation of bodyrelated topics? Sorcha Ní Fhlainn: It's a really interesting question, I think that the body is a text to be negotiated in the Gothic on a macro level, in terms of gender, sexuality, identity, all of these things and then also at a micro level-whether it's a microscopic disease, the terror of the unknown, abjection and transformation-everything from the kind of violent sense of othering that we see in the Gothic, all the way through to the transformational aspects of it through fantasy, sexuality, things like that which we see in authors such as Barker for example... so we see this throughout the Gothic in a way that documents the body as text, and the transformation of the body. The body is never really complete especially in the sense of the Gothic because we find that transformations are occurring all the time, whether it's psychological,

Growing Up with Vampires: Essays on the Undead in Children's Media, 2018

Throughout literary history, vampires have connected social and/or sexual deviance to disease. They ‘encompass a broad range of all things that defy normative constructions of nation and health’ and connote ‘a variety of fears attached to sexuality and disease’ (Fink 417). In nineteenth-century Gothic the vampire ‘disease’ incorporated a pathologized femininity; the emaciated bodies and degenerate appetites of female vampires metaphorically and thematically connected femininity to sickness. As Aspasia Stephanou argues, ‘vampire females are imagined as bodies open, uncontrolled, sick and dangerous’ (97). This chapter explores how children’s fiction has inherited these connections between vampires, femininity and sickness, developing and reworking the tropes of nineteenth-century vampire narratives in response to feminist critiques and rewritings. Examining three novels published between 1980 and 2010, I argue that children’s Gothic ‘nomadic’ ethical outlook offers innovative responses to the problematic and ambiguous construction of femininity in vampire narratives.

THE LITERARY VISION, 2023

The vampire genre in literature stands as a captivating and enduring facet of literary exploration, tracing its origins through a rich tapestry of cultural beliefs, folklore, and imaginative storytelling. Rooted in ancient legends and mythologies from various corners of the world, the vampire archetype has evolved over time to become a multifaceted symbol that resonates with diverse themes and societal anxieties. This genre has not only contributed to the creation of iconic literary works but has also deeply inuenced popular culture, extending its reach into film, television, and other media.

2022

In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault put forward the “repression hypothesis” concerning, in the modern age, sexuality. I postulate that Gothic fiction is a significant breakout of this hypothesis by highlighting (with reference to the vampire) its sexual transgressiveness. In Gothic literature, the vampire is an immortal creature who must prey on mortals to maintain their undeadness. Since early vampire stories, the vampire’s predatory behaviour has acquired a connotation of transgressive sexuality. This creative practice aims to explore vampiric desire and its connection to the emotions of love and loss as well with a focus on the same-sex desire of which there are relatively few examples in Gothic vampire fiction. This literature review, therefore, gives more account of Foucault’s “repression hypothesis” and then surveys vampire fiction as a subgenre of the Gothic, touching upon its origins and vampiric folklore and how these fictional creatures stand for Otherness and symbolise sexual transgression. Then I examine a selection of Queer realist fiction from the 20th and 21st centuries that offer insight into the themes of love, loss, and desire. Foucault’s use of Plato’s treatise, Phaedrus, aids in looking at queer realist fiction as models for gay desire, love, and loss. The insights gained by investigating these themes will be applied creatively to write a Queer vampire novella, entitled Lautréamont that challenges the conventions of desire in the genre, and which will ‘remix’ historical vampire fiction with contemporary queer literature on love, loss, and longing.

2011

This first-year undergraduate module examines the cultural history of the vampire in prose fiction from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Focusing each week on a key literary text – from classics such as Dracula, to popular contemporary manifestations such as Twilight – we will analyse the evolution of the vampire and what it represents within the historical and cultural contexts of each text studied. Adopting a range of critical lenses, from Marxist readings to Postcolonial approaches, we will chart the development of the vampire as a literary figure.