#nina auerbach

[winged-cries]

we were kids together, you and i

[cor-ardens-archive]

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves

[aeslinnreads]

"Love offers no salvation from vampires; instead, it summons them."

Our Vampires, Ourselves (Nina Auerbach)

[elektramouthed]

Because [vampires] are always changing, their appeal is dramatically generational. In 1991 and 1993, I taught large classes at the University of Pennsylvania on the evolution of vampires. In none of my other courses have age differences been so central. Aficionados all, the students acknowledged my favorite vampires more or less politely, but had to teach me to appreciate theirs. Moreover, the 1991 class searched with obsessive unanimity for the rules governing vampirism, rules that bored students in 1993, who were enchanted by the less governable world of Anne Rice and didn’t care much for anything outside. There may have been political reasons for this shift; between 1991 and 1993, the anxieties of the Persian Gulf War gave way to the looser, more amorphous climate of the Clinton administration. Whyever it happened, the vampires covered in these courses took life from generational debates: along with the differences between two groups of students, between myself and both groups, there were the distinctive perspectives of my teaching assistants, women in their twenties who were devoted to the vampires of the 1980s.

Nina Auerbach, from Our Vampires, Ourselves

[orpheuslament]

Vampires are neither inhuman nor nonhuman nor all-too-human: they are simply more alive than they should be.

– Introduction to Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach

[bloodcryptskull]

My Own "Lost Boys/Near Dark" take

Based on this image I've found linked here, for a long time I've been brainstorming my own take of my own "Lost Boys/Near Dark" style vampire story which I'm then taken back to Nina Auerbach's "Our Vampires Ourselves" where discusses that Vampires originally a threat to the patriarchy but by the 1980s came along, they suddenly became the patriarchy which is exemplified by Max the "Head Vampire" from "Lost Boys" and Jesse Hooker from "Near Dark" due to Reaganism of the era. Although the only difference is the films treated single parenthood such as the Single Mother from "Lost Boys" brought Evil to the home while the Single Father in "Near Dark" cured vampirism while the Grandfather was the one who defeated the "Head Vampire" in Lost Boys therefore further solidifying that patriarchal narrative as well.

The main point being that None of the Vampire gangs from those films represented a life outside patriarchy which is not only a 'wasted' opportunity but also it's an example of how Reaganist conservatism was pretty prevalent during that era. Which brings me to the main point of this current piece is that for a long time I've been trying to brainstorm ideas of a inversion of the story structure found in "Near Dark/Lost Boys" with Vampires being the protagonists characters and they actually do represent a life outside the patriarchy while the human characters like Hunters for example and especially those from her mortal life like her parents, etc represent the patriarchy and the status quo.

Like for example I would like to play on the "Blood transfusion" aspect like the protagonist's own father is a doctor who tries to cure her of vampirism via a Blood Transfusion but finds that it not only doesn't work but has rather disastrous consequences for him? And the Protagonists Grandfather is a Vampire Hunter and perhaps one of the main antagonists in the story? So the story I have in mind is that like in "The Lost Boys/Near Dark" the protagonist gets turned into a Vampire and she joins a Vampire gang where she experiences freedom for the first time in her entire life more so than she ever had as a mortal but then something happens she and the vampire gang gets ambushed by Vampire Hunters where she runs off to the night and people from her mortal life like her mother picks her up and her father due to being a Doctor and notices she's a Vampire and thinks her condition is curable with a Blood Transfusion but ends up in a huge disaster for him as she drains her Father dry so she runs off to the night and is found by a few members of her gang giving them time to recuperate but then the Hunters strike again revealing that the protagonist's Grandfather is actually one of the top leaders of the Hunter organization since she always knew that her Grandfather was a priest/minister and a deeply religious man but didn't realize that this is what he was up to all along and his main goal is to kill the "Head Vampire" as he believes that if he dies then entire "Vampire bloodline" will topple despite his very poor research on the matter though.

TL;DR It's a Lost Boys/Near Dark 'tribute' with Vampires as protagonists and Hunters as antagonists while keeping the spirit of the 1980s but in a more progressive take that is free of constraints of Reaganism if not it actually criticizes it.

Thoughts on the matter?

[orangerosebush]

Nina Auerbach, from Our Vampires, Ourselves

[dreamofmourning]

[soundlessl-y]

[ID: Vampires are neither inhuman nor nonhuman nor all-too-human; they are simply more alive than they should be. /end ID]

Nina Auerbach | Our Vampires, Ourselves

[malaisequotes]

“Vampires are neither inhuman nor nonhuman nor all-too-human; they are simply more alive than they should be.”

Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach

[claudiablogger]

it's literally claudia birth day. many are celebrating this

[winged-cries]

[cor-ardens-archive]

Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment

[aeslinnreads]

"Even a countercultural vampire is a product, if a resistant one, of its age."

Our Vampires, Ourselves (Nina Auerbach)

[elektramouthed]

There are no fangs, no slavering, no red eyes, no mesmerism, and no dematerialization, only a larger-than-average cat and a door that opens. The opening door is the key to this vampire: she is all body, though a mutating one, with no vampire trap to enforce transparency. Male vampires took their authority from the ghost of Hamlet’s father, but Carmilla’s is as cozy as a cat, though one eerily elongated.

Nina Auerbach, from Our Vampires, Ourselves

[chthonic-cassandra]

An anonymous individual asked @awildwickedslip for recommendations of literary criticism on the gothic, and she directed them to me, so I thought it was time I make a rec list on the topic.

I'm keep this to more general analyses, but of course have a lot of recommendations for more works on more specific texts (especially but not limited to Dracula).

I'm also including some things that are more properly about amatory or epistolary fiction, because I think an understanding of those genres will serve you well in contemplating the gothic.

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves

Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (eds), Shakespearean Gothic

Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle

David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror

Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman

Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola

Elizabeth Cook, Epistolary Bodies

Jacqueline Howard, Readng Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach

Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance

Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France

Peter Cryle, Geometry in the Budoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative

Jalal Toufic, Vampire: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature

Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Literature and the Invention of the Uncanny