The Vampire: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1474432484 ISBN 13: 9781474432481

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Comprehensively surveys the vampire as a cultural phenomenon

• Surveys the vampire from accounts of eighteenth-century folklore to its significance within present day culture
• Contemplates the vampire as a global and still-developing phenomenon through reportage, medicine, religion, poetry, literary and graphic fiction, and cinema
• Responds not merely to recent representations of the vampire in fiction and cinema but also to developments in theory from Queer studies to postcolonialism

The Vampire: An Edinburgh Companion examines the recurrent figure of the vampire from its folkloric origins, through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, to those twentieth- and twenty-first century innovations that have disseminated the un-dead across global popular culture. Through a systematically commissioned range of original essays, this volume offers an unequalled overview of both the textual and critical fields, advancing a challenging reassessment of the canonical and uncanonical un-dead in fiction, poetry, reportage, cinema and comic art. Interdisciplinary and international in conception, it interrogates not merely the enduring literary presence of the vampire but also the physical and spiritual implications of vampirism, tracing its conventions beyond Europe and the United States into Asia. This volume is an essential summary of representations of the vampire and how they help us contemplate victimhood, morality, mortality and human identity.

About this title

About the Authors

Nick Groom is Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau and Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter. He is the author of 20 books, including Twenty-First-Century Tolkien: What Middle-Earth Means To Us Today (2023), The Vampire: A New History (2020), as well as scholarly editions of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, for the Oxford World’s Classics series.

William Hughes was Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He is a Past President of the International Gothic Association and the author or editor of more than 20 books including Key Concepts in Victorian Studies (2023), The Dome of Thought: Phrenology and the Nineteenth Century Popular Imagination (2022) and Key Concepts in the Gothic (2018).

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1474432484
• ISBN 13: 9781474432481
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Nick Groom, William Hughes