Overview
- A unique study of the intersection of vampires and contagion
- Provides a timely insight into 21st century reaction to global pandemics and contagion
- Offers a critique on the ideological contagion at the heart of 21st century Western culture
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book examines how the vampire has always been connected to ideas of infection, pollution and disease—even more so in the 21st century where it expresses the horrors of unseen and unstoppable disease and the foreboding and anxiety that accompany viral outbreaks and wider epidemics. Here the vampire gives physical form to the contagion and associated anxieties around the perceived causes and spread of disease, where it can take on many forms from animal to pestilential particulate matter, creeping shadows and even malignant weather systems. If blood is life, it is the body of the vampire that is death. This timely study looks at how and why the vampire continues to fulfil this function and posits that the true patient zero in the 21st century is no longer the dangerous, ancient, outsider from the East but is the undying monster that is Western culture itself.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Simon Bacon is an independent scholar based in Poznań, Poland. He has written and edited 25+ books including Becoming Vampire (2017), Eco-vampires (2019), Nosferatu in the 21st Century (2023), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2 volumes, 2023), and The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (forthcoming).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Contagion and the Vampire
Book Subtitle: The Vampiric Body as Locus of Disease and Global Epidemics in 21st Century
Authors: Simon Bacon
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39202-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-39201-6Published: 11 August 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-39204-7Due: 11 September 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-39202-3Published: 10 August 2023
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 104
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Screen Studies, Gothic Studies, Popular Culture , Cultural Studies