Condition: Used, Like New. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact. The dust cover may show very slight wear on the very corner edges. No folded pages, no notes, no underlines or markings on the pages.

Details: From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, by Matthew Beresford

ISBN: 978-1861894038

Published: 2008

Pages: 224

The vampire of antiquity was a ghost, who became enfleshed as the revenant, the ghoul; then, particularly in eastern Europe, it turned into a blood-sucker. Under the ministrations of Western novelists, he pupated into the seductive, cape-wearing aristocrat of modern myth. This process Matthew Beresford delineates with great clarity ... fascinating.' Independent on Sunday 'Aficionados of vampire culture will probably find little to surprise them in this fascinating Study, but the rest of us will remain gripped throughout ... This is a fun study but it's also, as Beresford says, a Study in our fears, and ultimately, our fear of death.' The Herald, Glasgow From Bram Stoker's Dracula to Buff the Vampire Slayer, the vampire haunts popular culture and inhabits our darkest imaginings. Beresford's chronicle roams from the mountains of Eastern Europe to the foggy Streets of Victorian England and to Hollywood as he relates the compelling tale of this seductive lover of blood and its portrayal in history, literature and art. Investigating the historical Dracula - Vlad the Impaler - and his Status as a national hero in Romania, Beresford endeavours to winnow out truths from the complex legend. From Demons to Dracula tracks the evolution of the vampire, drawing on classical Greek and Roman myths, witch trials and medieval plagues, Gothic literature and contemporary works such as Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. Beresford also looks at the widespread impact of screen vampires from television shows, classic movies Starring Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, and more recent films such as Underworld and Blade. Whether as a demon of the underworld or a light-fearing hunter of humans, the vampire has endured through the centuries as a powerful symbolic figure for human concerns with life, death and the afterlife. Wide-ranging and engrossing, From Demons to Dracula casts this bloodthirsty nightstalker as a remarkably complex and telling totem of our nightmares, real and imagined. Matthew Beresford is a writer and archaeologist based in Bolsover, Derbyshire. With 50 illustrations