The Vampire: A Casebook

by Alan Dundes

Book Overview

Vampires are the most fearsome and fascinating of all creatures of folklore. For the first time, detailed accounts of the vampire and how its tradition developed in different cultures are gathered in one volume by eminent folklorist Alan Dundes. Eleven leading scholars from the fields of Slavic studies, history, anthropology, and psychiatry unearth the true nature of the vampire from its birth in graveyard lore to the modern-day psychiatric patient...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299159248
• ISBN13: 9780299159245
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An excellent collection of academic perspectives on vampires

If you are interested in getting behind the fiction to the facts of vampires, this is an excellent place to start. The collection of scholars who wrote essays for this volume come from anthropology as well as psychiatry, with historians as well as students of Slavic culture. Consequently, you are bound to find one perspective on vampires that will suit your personal inclinations. More importantly, taken as a whole the book provides a broad spectrum of academic study of the popular phenomenon.

Eleven scholars unearth the legend.

The vampire of literature and films is perhaps too familiar, but the underpinnings of the legends in the folk traditions of southeastern Europe are quite different from the popular image, and more interesting. Eleven fascinating essays by scholars in Slavic studies, anthropology, history, and psychiatry here illuminate this dark corner of primitive imagination, show how such a seemingly bizarre belief is tied to certain folk practices of exhumation, bring the studies up to date with cases of modern "vampires", and offer a psychoanalytic interpretation of the phenomenon. (The "score" rating is an unfortunately ineradicable feature of the page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)

interesting book

The Vampire--A Casebook, is fairly informative. It makes the observation in the first chapter that the word Vampire is actually of serbian origen, not transalvanian or hungarian as many people think. It is edited mostly by college professors none of whom seem to believe in any kinds of vampires as being real. One guy teaches a class on vampires at the University of Virginia. He edits the chapter of the book which deals with seventeen or so brief--one paragraph--reports of peasents in Romania's accounts of what vampires do. They're capable of drawing illusions of enchanted forests in so doing converting a hapless victem who believes the illusion into a vampire. The chapter on the greek vampire points out differences and variations of customs from other regions' as well as the similarity of: one way of making a vampire is to have a cat (or sometimes any other object) cross over a corpse. The grusome cover of this book will grab your attention.