San Antonio College Library

"During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets. In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked....

"This study of the vampire in literature from the early nineteenth century to the present analyzes its metaphorical characteristics. The vampire is the perfect figure of disorder and entropy, and its dominance as a literary figure/monster, an instigator of chaos of all kinds, makes it worthy of study for readers interested in an emerging theory of literary disorder as well as horror literature. Entropy, the most intriguing root metaphor of our time,...

In his Preface to The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, James Twitchell writes that he is not interested in the current generation of vampires, which he finds "rude, boring and hopelessly adolescent. However, they have not always been this way. In fact, a century ago they were often quite sophisticated, used by artists varied as Blake, Poe, Coleridge, the Brontes, Shelley, and Keats, to explain aspects of interpersonal relations....