Abstract: The ""phantom heroine"" - in particular the fantasy of her resurrection through sex with a living man - is one of the most striking features of traditional Chinese literature. Even today the hypersexual female ghost continues to be a source of fascination in East Asian media, much like the sexually predatory vampire in American and European movies, TV, and novels. But while vampires can be of either gender, erotic Chinese ghosts are almost exclusively female. The significance of this gender asymmetry in Chinese literary history is the subject of Judith Zeitlin's elegantly written and meticulously researched new book. Zeitlin's study centers on the seventeenth century, one of the most interesting and creative periods of Chinese literature and politically one of the most traumatic, witnessing the overthrow of the Ming, the Manchu conquest, and the subsequent founding of the Qing. Drawing on fiction, drama, poetry, medical cases, and visual culture, the author departs from more traditional literary studies, which tend to focus on a single genre or author. Ranging widely across disciplines, she integrates detailed analyses of great literary works with insights drawn from the history of medicine, art history, comparative literature, anthropology, religion, and performance studies. ""The Phantom Heroine"" probes the complex literary and cultural roots of the Chinese ghost tradition. Zeitlin is the first to address its most remarkable feature: the phenomenon of verse attributed to phantom writers - that is, authors actually reputed to be spirits of the deceased. She also makes the case for the importance of lyric poetry in developing a ghostly aesthetics and image code. Most strikingly, Zeitlin shows that the representation of female ghosts, far from being a marginal preoccupation, expresses cultural concerns of central importance.

Abstract: This is a book about jurisprudence--or legal philosophy. The legal philosophical texts under consideration are, to say the least, unorthodox. Tolkien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Million Dollar Baby, and other cultural products are all referenced as exemplary instances of what the author calls lex populi--"people's" or "pop law". There, more than anywhere else will one find the leading issues of legal philosophy. These issues, however are heavily coded, for few of these texts announce themselves as expressly "legal". Nonetheless, Lex Populi reads these texts "jurisprudentially": that is, with an eye to their hidden legal philosophical meanings, enabling connections such as: Tolkien's Ring as Kelsen's grundnorm; vampire slaying as legal language's semiosis; Hogwarts as substantively unjust; and a seriously injured young woman as termination's rights-bearer. In so doing, Lex Populi attempts not only a jurisprudential reading of popular culture, but a popular rereading of jurisprudence, removing it from the legal experts in order to restore it to the public at large: a lex populi by and for the people.

Abstract: This article offers a sociolinguistic analysis of selected dialogue from 66 episodes of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS). While the research record reveals an interest in the use of language on the show, it is argued here that the issue of language in relation to friendship bonds has thus far received insufficient treatment. In response, this study asks if Buffy and her friends (the Scoobies, as they call themselves after the ghost-busting teens in the cartoon Scooby-Doo) are represented as using vernacular variants to demonstrate in-group identity. Marked -y suffix adjectives (e.g. Heart-of-Darkness-y) are adopted as the linguistic variable, and the data are interpreted with reference to Lesley Milroy’s social network theory and Mick Short’s concept of embedded levels of discourse in drama dialogue. The findings demonstrate that marked -y reveals shifting alliances within the Scooby gang, as it characterizes not the gang as a whole, but only certain members. The findings also suggest...

Abstract: Foreword - Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner Introduction: Ladies Love Your Box: The Rhetoric of Pleasure and Danger in Feminist Television Studies - Merri Lisa Johnson 1 Gangster Feminism: The Feminist Cultural Work of HBO's 'The Sopranos' 2 Female Heterosexual Sadism: The Final Feminist Taboo in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series - Carol Seigel 3 Primetime Harem Fantasies: Marriage, Monogamy, and a Bit of Feminist Fanfiction on ABC's 'The Bachelor' - Katherine Frank 4 Getting Wet: The Heteroflexibility of Showtime's 'The L Word' - Candace Moore 5 Queer as Box: Boi Spectators and Boy Culture on Showtime's 'Queer as Folk' - J. Bobby Noble 6 Rape and Reality on HBO's 'Oz': An Advocate's Perspective - Lara Stemple 7 "The Room" as "Heterosexual Closet": The Life and Death of Alternative Relationalities on HBO's 'Six Feet Under' - Leslie Heywood

Abstract: lms of Oshii Mamoru, political struggle is not only palpable—it is positively sensual. Oshii’s fi lms chart the eff orts of people to make a diff erence or leave a trace in a politicized, mediated world where the importance of the individual is increasingly uncertain. Th e threat to individual agency is represented by political or technological networks that are ubiquitous but also invisible—power structures governing individual lives so completely that the structures themselves escape detection. Th ey can script an individual’s actions, rewrite memories, even substitute their own simulated reality for an individual’s lived life, all without leaving a mark. Opposing the tyranny of these structures is a longing for individual signifi cance that is often expressed as a sensuous desire for the individual body. Time and again in Oshii’s fi lms, it is romantic and carnal desire that assert the worth of the human. We see it in Patlabor 2 (1993), whose mecha pilots must strip off their claustrophobic mechanical suits in order to make human contact; in Oshii’s script for Jin-Roh (2000), where factional politics are momentarily suspended by a fairy-tale love story between a terrorist and a secret policeman; and in Ghost in the Shell (1995), where the ambivalent narrative about networked, disembodied consciousness is countered by the shapely The Quick and the Undead: Visual and Political Dynamics in Blood: The Last Vampire C H R I S T O P H E R B O L T O N

Abstract: A fascinating examination of how Americans think about and write about witches, from the 'real' witches tried and sometimes executed in early New England to modern re-imaginings of witches as pagan priestesses, comic-strip heroines and feminist icons.The first half of the book is a thorough re-reading of the original documents describing witchcraft prosecutions from 1640-1700 and a re-thinking of these sources as far less coherent and trustworthy than most historians have considered them to be. The second half of the book examines how these historical narratives have transformed into myths of witchcraft still current in American society, writing and visual culture. The discussion includes references to everything from Increase Mather and Edgar Allan Poe to Joss Whedon (the writer/director of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which includes a Wiccan character) and The Blair Witch Project.

Abstract: Based on a corpus of recent French films, this article looks at an intriguing phenomenon: the reappearance of the figure of the vampire. Unfettered by spatial and temporal limits, the vampire has always epitomised the inhuman ability (which it shares with cinema) to reproduce and disseminate itself seamlessly. It thus thrives in an era of intensified transnational circulation and deregulated greed. This article suggests, however, that vampirism in its contemporary guises, operating as a symbolic presence and permeating the very texture of the films, conjures up anxieties that exceed and, indeed, contradict its original role in the stigmatisation of a fantasised East European Other.

Abstract: When the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired in 2003, fans mourned the death of the hit television series. Yet the show has lived on through syndication, global distribution, DVD release, and merchandising, as well as in the memories of its devoted viewers. Buffy stands out from much entertainment television by offering sharp, provocative commentaries on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and youth. Yet it has also been central to changing trends in television production and reception. As a flagship show for two U.S. “netlets”—the WB and UPN— Buffy helped usher in the “post-network” era, and as the inspiration for an active fan base, it helped drive the proliferation of Web-based fan engagement. In Undead TV , media studies scholars tackle the Buffy phenomenon and its many afterlives in popular culture, the television industry, the Internet, and academic criticism. Contributors engage with critical issues such as stardom, gender identity, spectatorship, fandom, and intertextuality. Collectively, they reveal how a vampire television series set in a sunny California suburb managed to provide some of the most biting social commentaries on the air while exposing the darker side of American life. By offering detailed engagements with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s celebrity image, science-fiction fanzines, international and “youth” audiences, Buffy tie-in books, and Angel’s body, Undead TV shows how this prime-time drama became a prominent marker of industrial, social, and cultural change. Contributors . Ian Calcutt, Cynthia Fuchs, Amelie Hastie, Annette Hill, Mary Celeste Kearney, Elana Levine, Allison McCracken, Jason Middleton, Susan Murray, Lisa Parks

Abstract: The extent to which ethnicity permeates an understanding of identity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is apparent from the ways in which species difference stands in for racial or ethnic difference. However, among its many points of contact with ethnicity, one that is especially curious is the case of Willow Rosenberg's disappearing Jewishness. As a character, she shifts from nerd, to poster-child for geek-chic, she suffers from major addiction, is a lesbian and ends up as something approaching a goddess. She is also, intermittently, Jewish. The paper encourages a reading of Willow that sees her as cool and occasionally as Jewish but not necessarily as Jewish cool. To that extent, Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be read as an index of shifting sensibilities in relation to representations of Jews in popular culture whereby old stereotypes and perceptions are largely ignored, but there are not yet the necessary store of images and discourses available for young Jewish womanhood.

Abstract: Once the vampire was seen as the villainous antagonist in literature and film, but over the last two centuries the character has evolved into the vigilante anti-hero. This paper analyzes the transformation of the vampire character asking, "How can it be that something that should provoke fear and repulsion is now an icon of popular culture?" Use of Joseph Campbell’s theories of mythology and culture alongside the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung presents one explanation for the vampire’s shift from monster to dark hero. Uri https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/3224 Collections Honors College Theses 

Abstract: From bloodsucking schoolgirls to flesh-eating zombies, and from psychopathic killers to beasts from hell, "100 European Horror Films" provides a lively and illuminating guide to a hundred key horror movies from the 1920s to the present day. Alongside films from countries particularly associated with horror production - notably Germany, Italy, and Spain - and movies by key horror filmmakers such as Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci, "100 European Horror Films" also includes films from countries as diverse as Denmark, Belgium, and the Soviet Union, and filmmakers such as Bergman, Polanski and Claire Denis, more commonly associated with art cinema. The book features entries representing key horror subgenres such as the Italian 'giallo' thrillers of the late 60s and 70s, psychological thrillers, and zombie, cannibal, and vampire movies.Each entry includes a plot synopsis, major credits, and a commentary on the film's significance, together with its production and exhibition history. Films covered in the book include early classics such as Paul Wegener's "The Golem", Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", and Murnau's "Nosferatu"; 70s horror favorites such as "Daughters of Darkness", "The Beast", and "Suspiria"; and, notable recent releases such as "The Devil's Backbone", "Malefique", and "The Vanishing".

Abstract: The Vampire is a parasitic demon who has haunted humanity for thousands of years. Feedinq off the living, this bloodsucking, animated corpse could generally be said to embody human fears surrounding death and sexuality Appearing in a variety of mythologies around the world, the vampire has been connected with excessive and/or repressed desire, the subconscious and the dark side of human nature. The vampire and associated metaphors reflect social boundaries and express forbidden desires, in particular. when the figure appeared in late-Gothic literature of the 18th-century novel. The transitions occurring within the vampire's iconography over the last 200 years of Western history offer us a fascinating mirror through which to examine social change. This thesis presents a brief historic outline of the path sketched out by this imaginary avatar. from its departure in folklore and superstition into 18th and 19th-century poetry and literature appearing as a preternatural lover a:id then finally arriving on the screen as the iconic villain/hero of the 20th century. Focusing on issues of gender, sexua11ry, capitalism and desire. this thesis draws the conclusion that the 21st-century vampire is a consumer. lost in an insatiable and disorientating 'bloodlust' of maten31ist desire. Through exploring the lineage of patriarchal terror and vampiricism endemic within our global consumer consciousness and behaviour. this thesis draws an analogy between the attitudes towards, and surrounding, the woman's body and the body of our Earth, the Mother. It asserts that the ideologies of desire explicit within late-capitalist society expose an erotic libidinal economy, which perceives both women and the Earth as commodity, there to be possessed and consumed. Accompanying this thesis paper is a creative project called The Gothic Opera: A Symphony in Terror. This hybrid performance incorporated dance, aerial theatre and opera in a collaborative theatre event involving over thirty artists. The Gothic Opera traces a historical route through the shifting poetic

Abstract: In his paper, "Globalisation, Empire, and the Vampire," Mario Vrbancic opens up the question of the possibility of a dialectical utopian thinking in postmodernism. Following Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Vrbancic analyses the vampire as the nation looking both at Hardt and Negri's theory of Empire and Žižek psychoanalytically inclined theory of nationalist identification. The vampire always occurs in the wake and decay of Empires: Dracula embodies Victorian fears of the infestation of the undead by invading the imperial centre; in America vampires disperse and multiply in popular culture and the mass media; in a newly emerging global order (Empire) they may embody the power of the multitude, with a view from the real of a hazy mirage of the earthly Jerusalem in their quest for global citizenship. Mario Vrbancic, "Globalisation, Empire, and the Vampire" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.2 (2007):

Abstract: Rosa Campbell Praed left Australia for London in 1876. In the decade or so subsequent to her arrival in the metropolis she forged a successful career as a writer of occult-inspired novels that drew on both theosophical doctrine and a nineteenth-century tradition of popular fiction that included Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. A string of novels published in the 1880s and the early 1890s, including Nadine: the Study of a Woman (1882), Affinities: A Romance of Today (1885), The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of Today (1886), and The Soul of Countess Adrian: A Romance (1891), produced a sort of popular aestheticism that melded an interest in fashionable society, a market-oriented Gothicism, and speculations on the philosophy of art that were indicative of Praed's relationship to a fin-de-siecle Bohemia and its literary circles. There is no doubt that these novels can be located in terms of the numerous popular genres - the art novel, the aesthetic novel, the occult novel1 - that form the literary background to much better known texts such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker's Dracula and George du Maurier's Trilby. But to account for Praed's ephemerality in terms of a series of generic categories elides too easily the pressures - economic, political, and aesthetic - impinging on a colonial, female novelist quickly forging a career at the centre of an imperial culture. Praed's novels are hybrid, polysemic creations, over-determined by these pressures, which in turn, no doubt, have contributed to her invisibility in contemporary literary studies. Their Gothicism and their appropriation of theosophical doctrine are both manifest in themes like mesmerism, telepathy, duel personality, and the recurring figure of the spiritual or "moral vampire." Yet these obviously commercial novels are also intensely invested in aesthetic questions, in the dislocated character of imperial experience, in the accrual of cultural capital, and in their own relationship to the vexed question of their originality vis-a-vis the market for popular fiction. In this essay I want to think about the ways in which Praed's occult-inspired novels deploy the figure of the vampire-aesthete, at the centre of both Affinities and The Soul of Countess Adrian, to introduce a self-reflexive relationship to the different economies of value in which they were embedded. In suggesting that Praed's vampire-aesthetes articulate anxieties about cultural value and influence in an imperial economy, I also want to diversify the provenance of the fin-de-siecle vampire. Recent work on late nineteenth-century aestheticism has persuasively discussed the semiotic force of the vampire in regard to questions of sexual identity. Robert Dixon, one of the few critics to engage with Praed's occult fiction and to locate it in terms of its relationship to better known writers like Bram Stoker, reads her interest

Abstract: In his 1872 vampire novella Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu encodes forbidden passions through the use of names. Written at a time when samesex relations were punishable by imprisonment, Carmilla's naming and wordplay suggest the Sapphic seductions between a female vampire and her unwitting descendant without being dangerously explicit. In every incarnation over the centuries, Carmilla must adopt an anagrammatical variation of her original name, each of which carries its own host of interpretations hinting at the forbidden same-sex desires in the text. Ultimately, however, Le Fanu had to conform to the conventions of his time and has a posse of men solve the riddle of Carmilla's name and her demonic desires. By the novella's end, Carmilla's derivations are decipherable, her history traceable, and her fate reduced to a patriarchal paronomasia.

Abstract: Campbell, Kate, ed. Journalism, Literature and Modernity: From Hazlitt to Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. 234 pp. $30. One after another, the critics in Journalism, Literature and Modernity repeat the insults that literary culture has bestowed on journalists: vampire, louse, prostitute, dilettante, lazy and effeminate member of the lower cksses, and enemy of the "modern sensibility" no matter how one defines it Since those imprecations were for the most part culled from the period in British journalism examined in the book's ten contemporary scholarly essays, covering the period roughly from the early nineteenth century and William Hazlitt to 1940 and Laura Riding, perhaps we are accentuating the negative to quote them today. Collection editor Kate Campbell says not. A teacher at the University of East Anglia and the University of Cambridge, she quoted American media critic Joli Jenson, writing a decade ago: "Renowned scholars in history, literature, philosophy and sociology seemed unable to shed their mistrust of, and disdain for, mass communication in any form. They returned over and over to a monolithic vision of the mass media as individual, social and cultural corruption. I struggled to get past this vision." In just the spirit of diose "renowned scholars," contemporary literary studies have refused to grant journalism status as literature, "neglecting and disparaging journalism," Campbell says. However, invidious comparisons in place and ready to be swept aside, this collection is not a simple exercise in contradiction. Each of these critics places her or his subject in the context of journalism-if only as an editor of or a contributor to a literary periodical-and of "the modern," no matter how it is defined. Most of these essays say only that the writer's work as a journalist is worthy of study. They do not celebrate or strain in defense. A caveat Some essays refine what we already knew. Jon Cook talks about the essayist Hazlitt's conversational style, which earlier scholars might simply have called an example of early nineteenth-century Romantic individualism. Cook links it, in its "freedom of subjectivity," to Hegel, McLuhan and Derrida. Geoffrey Hemstedt reminds us how Charles Dickens was a working editor of Household Words and All the Year Round in the 1850s and 1860s and roamed the streets of London at night, finding in the experiences of those he encountered "the terms in which a reformist program might be framed. …

Abstract: Between 1911 and 1926, novels and films fueled anti-Mormon sentiment in Great Britain. Winifred Graham's novel The Love Story of a Mormon portrayed a mesmerizing polygamist deceiving and enslaving girls. Later, Graham's book was made into the film Trapped by the Mormons . Both the novel and the movie drew images from vampire lore made popular by Bram Stoker's Dracula . The Mormon villain in Trapped by the Mormons has come from a faraway land, promises the possibility of eternal life, and can mesmerize victims, like Count Dracula. Though sensationalistic, the film colored British audience's perceptions of Mormon missionaries as vampire-like predators. Today, such films provide cultural insights into the anti-Mormon movement of the time.

Abstract: Dressing up as Vampires is an ethnographic audience study investigating issues of identity and the masquerade within the active female vampire fan community. Drawing on previous theoretical material by Milly Williamson (2005), Paul Hodkinson (2002) and wider methodological approaches such as Lori Kendall (1999) this paper will focus on the negotiation of female fans’ identities across various online networks such as MySpace, LiveJournal, VEIN (Vampire Exchange Information Network) and Yahoo newsgroups. Its objective is to explore how identity is constructed in the virtual community via imagery (avatars & graphics), photography and text and to what extent this online persona encroaches and impacts upon fans’ ‘real lives’. Through analysis of these online networks I will suggest that female vampire fans use the Internet as an extension of their identity, and although they may construct an alternate persona within cyberspace, this usually serves as a reinforcement of their idealised ‘real life’ identity.