engleski

From sheer horror to titillating thrill: how the word vampire keeps acquiring new meanings

The purpose of this work is to show how, through centuries, literature, film and television influenced popular imagination and added layers of meaning, both denotative and connotative, to the word vampire. Even if the figure of the undead, bloodsucking demon can be found in different mythologies, most experts would agree that the word vampire is of Slavic origin and that the imaginaire one is accustomed to relate to it is a part of the Slavic lore. The word vampire first entered English language in the late eighteenth century as a mention in a travelogue, but the vampire become a part of the popular imagination in the nineteenth century and made its grand entrance as the character of a fictional prose. It appeared first as the title of a novelette by John William Polidori, a close friend and a part of Lord Byron's circle and then as a character in Bram Stocker's seminal work Dracula. It is exactly the sinister count that engendered the countless vampires of the twentieth and the twenty first century, and the count's progeny evolved with the evolution of the new media, namely film and television from where it proliferated even to the discourse of medicine. It is to be argued that all the meanings one attributes to the word are literary, as they were first created in the artist imagination from where they entered language. In my presentation I will try to track as closely as the length of the presentation allows the evolution of the vampire from the 18th and 19th century incarnation of evil to the seductive and self sacrificing tall dark stranger of the 21st century film and TV sagas.

vampire, myth, fictional prose, evolution of meaning

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