Published in 2012
242 pages
Nina Auerbach (1943-2017) was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Though her area of academic concentration was in Victorian literature, she also ranged through cultural history, horror fiction, and film.
What is this book about?
This “vigorous, witty look at the undead as cultural icons in 19th- and 20th-century England and America” examines the many meanings of the vampire myth (Kirkus Reviews).
From Byron’s Lord Ruthven to Anne Rice’s Lestat to the black bisexual heroine of Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, vampires have taken many forms, capturing and recapturing our imaginations for centuries. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach explores the rich history of this literary and cultural phenomenon to illuminate how every age embraces the vampire it needs—and gets the vampire it deserves.
Working with a wide range of texts, as well as movies and television, Auerbach follows the evolution of the vampire from 19th century England to 20th century America. Using the mercurial figure as a lens for viewing the last two hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history, “this seductive work offers profound insights into many of the urgent concerns of our time” (Wendy Doniger, The Nation).
