The objective of my dissertation is to reveal the fictional progress of the vampire, to demonstrate how in the Anglo-Saxon vampire representations we have got from the antagonistic parasitic bloodsuckers to the vampire figures living in symbiosis with human beings, which are both part of contemporary popular culture.
To accomplish this, I study the English literary texts depicting the nineteenth-century antagonists, then Rice’s twentieth-century sympathetic vampire, which tries to get rid of the opposition to humans but fails to do so, and finally the Meyerean twenty-first-century integrated vampire succeeding in the process.
In the twentieth century, the film was the primary source of the spreading and maintenance of the vampire myth in popular culture. The films of Murnau’s Nosferatu and Browning’s Dracula were still adaptations of Stoker’s work, from which, as a sequel of the latter, Hillyer’s work entitled Dracula’s Daughter departed. The Dracula films of the Hammer Film Productions took this further, which, after the icon of Béla Lugosi appearing in Browning’s film, featured another icon universalising Dracula in Christopher Lee’s portrayal. These still adapted the nineteenth-century monster figures, then the films of Badham’s Dracula and Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula liberated the character.
With the appearance of electronic texts, the present also represents a medial change. The most integrated platform of electronic databases is Apple Books. From here, I have selected Naylor’s vampire short stories, which exhibit the contemporary fictional character traits by the diverse vampire figures appearing in the first vampire universe published in the database.
Discussing all these, I present the vampire figure in a historiographic, intermedial and comparative analysis, thus I establish a character typology as well as highlight the allusive and synergic relations among its elements. My conclusion is that the vampire canon constitutes the progress of the vampire and heightens the figure in popular perception by innovation, modernising and actualising the figure, and iteration of elements found in previous works, which represents continuity with them.