Seminar on Victorian Literature: Studies of the Vampire Literature
Spring 2013
(A Tentative Syllabus)
Teacher: 林明澤
Classroom: 修齊大樓 26512 室
Office: 修齊大樓 26640 室
Phone number: 2757575 ext. 52248
E-mail Address: linmt@mail.ncku.edu.tw.
II. Class Hours:
14:10~17:00 on every Monday
III. Description of the Course:
This course aims to introduce the motif of vampire or vampirism in
the 19th-century Euro-American (mostly British) culture; it traces how the
motif was salvaged from East European folklore and developed/
transformed in the nineteenth-century literature until the beginning of the
twentieth century. Another, no less appropriate title for the course would
be “Vampire until Dracula” because its main concern is to reshape the
students’ understanding of the vampire as a cultural icon. After all, their
impressions about the figure have been dominated by his/her modern,
excessively romanticized and eroticized, rendering in popular culture
(Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and their cinematic derivatives are
salient examples); even the students’ understanding of Count Dracula is
probably not faithful to his novelistic original but is based on reductive
representations of him in all sorts of cultural products. Therefore,
through a bunch of representative texts drawn from diverse disciplines,
this course intends to guide the students from the vampire’s emergence out
of East European folklore, through his/her debut in the European literary
scenes (first in poetry, then in fiction), as well as his/her evolution as a
carrier of many different cultural meanings in the 19th century, and end up
with his/her best known avatar in Count Dracula.
Besides the first few items of introductory nature, most pieces of the
vampire literature are arranged in a ROUGHLY chronological order—to
give the students a sense of the development or transformation of the
literary imagination over the vampire figure. The publication dates of
these texts span across the 19th century, up to the beginning of the First
World War. Also, to make the students understand better how the
vampire motif was used in the Victorian age for expression of thoughts on
diverse cultural issues, I try to group the texts under several descriptive
headings; hopefully they will help the students locate the texts in the grand,
I.
1
kaleidoscopic picture of the modern vampire culture. Beyond these
headings and categories, a more general theme or concern that runs
through the vampire literature of the period is a shift from the magical to
the scientific in approaching vampirism; there was a tendency to make
sense of vampire phenomena less in terms of ancient witchcraft but more
in terms of advanced technology. The efforts to reconceive vampirism in
the 19th century eventually participates in the overall project of modernity
in the Western civilization.
Although it has become quite common in the graduate program of an
English department outside Taiwan (even a graduate program in the
University of Hertfordshire, England), this course is still highly erratic in
our program, for some of the texts are not from the familiar disciplines like
literary studies and most of them are not major, well-known literary texts
(which means that I cannot rely on much ready source of criticism to help
us analyze these texts). Although I know I cannot be very wishful, my
ideal students for this course are those who have sufficient knowledge of
the 19th-century European culture, so I can read and discuss these texts
along with them. Students who take the course and expect to keep
silence while simply listening to my speech-like lectures (as I often did in
my courses) will probably be disappointed; instead, I expect more active
participation in class discussion and I am generally impatient, even rude,
with pointless responses from the students. You are strongly advised to
take these conditions into consideration before you decide to stick to your
former selection of the course out of ill-informed motives.
IV. Class Schedule:
Feb. 18th
Introduction to the Course
A General Overview
Feb. 25th
Christopher Frayling, “Lord Byron to Count Dracula”
Folkloric and Forensic Vampire
Mar. 4th
Felix Oinas, “East European Vampires” ()
Paul Barber, “Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire” ()
John V. A. Fine, Jr. “In Defense of Vampires” ()
Psychoanalytic Vampire
Mar. 11th
Ernest Jones, “The Vampire” in On the Nightmare ()
James Twitchell, “The Vampire Myth” ()
Early Poetic Vampire
Mar. 18th
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Bride of Corinth” ()
2
Bürger, “Lenora” ()
David Mallet, “William and Margaret” ()
Anonymous, “William and Majorie” ()
John Stagg, “The Vampyre” ()
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel” ()
Jonas Spatz, “The Mystery of Eros” ()
Elizabeth M. Liggins, “Folklore and the Supernatural in ‘Christabel’”
()
Ruthvon and His Descendants
Mar. 25th
Apr. 1st
John Polidori, “The Vampyre” ()
Lord George G. Byron, “Fragment of a Story”
Anonymous, “The Bride of the Isles” ()
Mair Rigby, “‘Prey to some cureless disquiet’” ()
(Holiday)
Romantic Vampire
th
Apr. 8
Johann Ludwig Tieck, “Wake Not The Dead” ()
Théophile Gautier, “The Dead Leman (La Morte Amoureuse)” ()
Anonymous, “The Mysterious Stranger” ()
James Malcolm Rymer, Varney the Vampire (excerpt, along with
James Twitchell’s plot summary)
Nina Auerbach, “Varney’s Moon” in Our Vampires, Ourselves ()
Stage Vampire
Apr. 15th
J. R. Planché, The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles! ()
Alexander Dumas, “A Visit to the Theatre”
W. T. Moncrieff, The Spectre Bridegroom ()
Vampire as Social Other
Apr. 22th
E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Aurelia” ()
Sabine Baring-Gould, “A Dead Finger” ()
F. Marion Crawford, “For the Blood Is the Life” ()
Mary E. Braddon, “Good Lady Ducayne” ()
Vampire as Ethnic/Racial Other
Apr. 29th
Alexis Tolstoy, “The Family of the Vourdalak” ()
X. L., “A Kiss of Judas” ()
Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Fate of Madame Cabanel” ()
Edward Lucas White, “Amina” ()
Lesbian/Incestuous Vampire
May 6th
Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla”
Arthur H. Nethercot, “Coleridge's ‘Christabel’ and Lefanu's
3
‘Carmilla’” ()
May 13th
Raymond T. McNally, “In Search of the Lesbian Vampire” ()
William Veeder, “‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression” ()
Angelica Michelis, “‘Dirty Mamma’: Horror, Vampires, and the
Maternal in Late Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction” ()
Ambrose Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Fraser” ()
RESPONSE PAPER DUE
Psychological Vampire
May 20th
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Parasite” ()
Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, “Luella Miller” ()
Algernon Blackwood, “The Transfer” ()
Artistic Vampire
May 27th
Anne Crawford, “A Mystery of Campagna” ()
Julian Hawthorne, “Ken’s Mystery” ()
Hume Nisbet, “The Old Portrait” ()
Princely Vampire
rd
June 3
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Patrick Johnson, “Count Dracula and the Folkloric Vampire: Thirteen
Comparisons” ()
Benson Saler & Charles A. Ziegler, “Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters
and the Mind” ()
June 10th
June 17th
July 1st
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
()
Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’” ()
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Franco Moretti, “Dracula and Capitalism” ()
Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media” ()
FINAL PAPER DUE
V. Teaching Materials:
This syllabus in its present, tentative form is structured around a gregarious
collection of more than forty texts, which are of diverse natures such as survey of
literary history, short story, novelette, poetry, theatre play, journal, critical essay,
etc. Although many of these texts are not easily available in hardcopy form,
fortunately for about half of them I have digital copies, which I have downloaded
free either from websites featuring vampire literature or from the electronic
4
database resources provided by the school library.
For those texts that are not
yet available in digital form, I will still have them scanned and turn them into
digital copies. All these files will then be uploaded onto the course webpage on
Moodle; you can print them out if you like. The only text you need to buy, the
Oxford Edition of Dracula, I already asked the Kaoshiung Branch of Bookman
Bookstore (高雄書林書局 (07) 229-0300) to reserve copies of the book for the
course. I can order the copies you need as a group to get a discount.
There are several reasons why I do not print out all the required texts and
have them bound into a volume in advance (a copy of which then you can simply
buy from a photocopy shop) though this is the common practice. First, such a
volume of course materials is often bulky and unwieldy; the texts may be more
securely preserved for future use, but the volume cannot be easily carried around.
Another more important reason is that, by providing digital materials, I keep the
syllabus open for possible future changes: in responses to such factors as time
restriction, the students’ reception, schedule conflict, etc., some texts may be
replaced by others or simply removed from the syllabus. I believe that it should
save time and money if the texts are offered to you in this electronic manner.
This course is already “vampiric”; I don’t want it to enervate or sap the Mother
Earth further by having more trees cut down to make paper and feel those
voracious photocopy machines.
VI. Class Activities:
1. Each week two or three students are required to do oral presentations on the texts;
each presentation will take no more than 15 minutes. The oral presentations will
be followed by a general discussion among the students and the teacher.
2. I will have a course webpage set up on the school’s Internet teaching platform,
Moodle (http://moodle.ncku.edu.tw/ ). Oral report outlines and PowerPoint files
prepared by both you and me will be posted on the webpage. A forum is also set
up on the website, and each student is encouraged to join general discussion. You
are welcomed to come up there to start or join discussion threads related to the
course work; I will hang around, too, reading your discussion or even joining it.
VII. Requirements:
1. Each student is required to do three oral presentations on the course materials; for
each presentation a student may have to cover more than one text while two
students may be responsible for one text, depending on the length of the text. The
presenter should prepare a copy of the presentation outline for each participant or
a PowerPoint file for me to put on the course webpage. If the text concerned is
literary fiction in nature, the presenter should not simply give a plot summary;
instead, themes, issues, or questions should be brought up to stimulate further
5
discussion. Since we don’t have much time for each session, the presenter should
limit the time within 15 minutes. Don’t fall into trivial details when preparing the
outline or the PowerPoint file; important details will come up during the following
discussion.
2. Each student is required to write one response papers (5 pages for Ph.D. and 3 for
M.A. students) on a theme or issue of the 19th-century vampire discourse, chosen
by him/herself. This paper does not need to be documented (i.e. with such
scholarly appendages as quotations, notes, bibliography, etc.), but it should focus
on and develop a single issue or idea. DON’T just write down your general
impressions about several stories or an issue. Writing the response paper will help
you generate ideas for your final term paper.
3. The final paper in due on July 1st. It should be around 15 pages long for the Ph.D.
and 10 pages long for the M.A. students (“Works Cited” included), following the
MLA style (i.e. one-inch margin, 1.5-space between lines, Times New Roman
No.12 font, foot-note format, etc.) The paper will be corrected, graded, and
returned to you after the summer break. You can develop your response paper into
this final paper, but DON’T just copy long passages from the former into the later.
Besides, all the appendages to an academic paper (title, footnotes, etc.) are
required.
4. Plagiarism is a highly offensive crime in the academic world, so be careful with
your quotations and documentations. Flagrant violations of related regulations will
certainly leave me no choice but to fail you in this course. Besides, as you will see
when I return your response paper graded and corrected, I care a lot about my
students’ writing ability, and I firmly demand clarity and correctness in your
papers. If you are not sure about the quality of your papers, find a copyeditor to
fix any possible problems and errors before you turn them in. If I simply cannot
understand your arguments because of these problems in your papers, I will not
grade them until you revise them and make them readable.
5. As you are all graduate students, it becomes impolite of me to demand your class
attendance. However, if you are found absent quite often, you still may not be able
to get the kind of grade you expect—even though you do your oral presentations
and turn in your papers as required.
VIII.
Evaluation:
Oral presentation 20%, Class discussion 20%: short response paper 20%; long
term paper 40%
IX. Bibliography:
This bibliography lists only items that are to be used as teaching materials. I have all
6
of them and am ready to share them with you.
Auerbach, Nina. “Varney’s Moon.” Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1995. 27-38. [Available in our library]
Barber, Paul. “Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire.” Dundes 109-42.
Baring-Gould, Sabine. “A Dead Finger.” 1904. Dalby 249-63.
Bierce, Ambrose. “The Death of Halpin Fraser.” 1893. Can Such Thing Be? New
York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1909. 3-14. [Available as E-book in the library]
Blackwood, Algernon. “The Transfer.” 1912. Ryan 203-12.
Braddon, Mary E. “Good Lady Ducayne.” 1896. Ryan 138-65.
“The Bride of the Isles.” 1820. The Literary Gothic 26 September 2012 19 February
2013 <http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/bride_of_the_isles.html>
Bürger, Gottfried. “Lenora.” 1773. Trans. William Taylor 1796. Romantic Circles 19
February 2013 <http://www.rc.umd.edu/rchs/reader/lenora.html>
Byron, George G. “Fragment of a Story.” Frayling 126-30.
Byron, Glennis, ed. Dracula: Bram Stoker. New Casebooks Series. London:
Macmillan, 1999.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Christabel.” 1797. Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Ed. M. H. Abrams et al. 7th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2000. 441-58.
Collins, Margo, ed. Before the Count: British Vampire Tales, 1732-1897. Zittaw, 2007.
Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula.” Byron 93-118.
Crawford, F. Marion. “For the Blood Is the Life.” 1911. Ryan 188-202.
Dalby, Richard. Ed. Dracula’s Brood: Vampire Classics by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
M.R. James and Others. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1987.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Parasite.” 1894. Dalby 111-44
Dumas, Alexandre. “A Visit to the Theatre.” Frayling 131-44.
Dundes, Alan, ed. The Vampire: A Casebook. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P,
1998. [Available in our library]
Fanu, Sheridan Le. “Carmilla.” 1872. Best Ghost Stories of J. S. LeFanu. New York:
Dover, 1964. 274-339.
Fine, John V. A. Jr. “In Defense of Vampires.” Dundes 57-66
Frayling, Christopher, ed. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber
and Faber, 1991. [A copy kept by me]
Gautier, Théophile. “The Dead Leman (La Morte Amoureuse).” 1836. Théophile
Gautier’s Short Stories. Trans. George Burnham Ives. New York: G. P. Putnam,
1909. 175-246.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “The Bride of Corinth.” 1797. Before the Count:
7
British Vampire Tales 1732-1897. Ed. Margo Collins. Zittaw Press, 2007.
136-42.
Hawthorne, Julian. “Ken's Mystery.” 1883. Dalby 92-110.
Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Aurelia.” The Serapion Brethren. 1820. Frayling 190-207.
Johnson, Patrick. “Count Dracula and the Folkloric Vampire: Thirteen Comparisons.”
Journal of Dracula Studies 3 (2001). 13 Mar. 2008. 20 Feb. 2009.
<http://www.blooferland.com/drc/images/03Johnson.rtf>
Jones, Ernest. “The Vampire.” On the Nightmare. New York: Grove, 1959. 131-53.
[Available in our library]
Liggins, Elizabeth M. “Folklore and the Supernatural in ‘Christabel.’” Folklore 88.1
(1977): 91-104.
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “The Fate of Madame Cabanel.” 1881. Dalby 43-54.
McNally, Raymond T. “In Search of the Lesbian Vampire.” Journal of Dracula
Studies 3 (2001). 13 Mar. 2008. 20 Feb. 2009.
<www.blooferland.com/drc/images/03McNally.doc>
Michelis, Angelica. “‘Dirty Mamma’: Horror, Vampires, and the Maternal in Late
Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fiction.” Critical Survey 15.3 (2003): 5-22.
“The Mysterious Stranger.” 1860. Ryan 36-70.
Moncrieff, W. T. The Spectre Bridegroom. Collins 87-110.
Moretti, Franco. “Dracula and Capitalism.” Byron 43-54.
Nethercot, Arthur H. “Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Lefanu’s ‘Carmilla.’” Modern
Philology 47.1 (1949): 32-38. [Available as digital copy]
Nisbet, Hume. “The Old Portrait.” 1900. Dalby 222-25
Oinas, Felix. “East European Vampires.” Dundes 47-56.
Planché, J. R. The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles. Collins 68-86.
Polidori, John. “The Vampyre.” The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Eds.
Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. [The book
available in our library; a more complete version of the text available as digital
copy]
Rigby, Mair. “‘Prey to some cureless disquiet’: Polidori’s Queer Vampyre at the
Margins of Romanticism.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (formerly
Romanticism on the Net) 36-37 (November 2004): 14 par. Ed. Michael
Eberle-Sinatra. 3 Feb. 2009. Université de Montréal, Montréal. 19 Feb 2009.
<http://www.erudit.org/revue/RON/2004/v/n36-37/011135ar.html >
Roth, Phyllis A. “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Byron 30-42.
Ryan, Alan. The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Rymer, James Malcolm. Excerpt of Varney the Vampire. Ryan 26-35
Saler, Benson and Charles A. Ziegler. “Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters and the
8
Mind.” Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005): 218-227.
Spatz, Jonas. “The Mystery of Eros: Sexual Initiation in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel.’”
PMLA 90.1 (1975): 107-16.
Stagg, John. “The Vampyre.” The Minstrel of the North. 1810. The Literary Gothic.
26 September 2012 19 February 2013.
<http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/stagg_vampyre.pdf>
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. Ed. Maud Ellmann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.
Tieck, Johann Ludwig. “Wake Not The Dead.” 1800. The Minstrel of the North. 1810.
Frayling 167-92.
Tolstoy, Alexis. “The Family of the Vourdalak.” 1840. Frayling 253-79.
Twitchell, James. “The Vampire Myth.” Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics. Ed.
Margaret Carter. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. 109-16.
Veeder, William. “‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression.” Nineteenth-Century Gothic: At
Home with the Vampire. Vol. 3 of Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and
Cultural Studies. Ed. Fred Botting and Dale Townshend. 4 vols. London:
Routledge, 2004. [The whole series available in school library]
White, Edward Lucas. “Amina.” Lukundoo and Other Stories. 1907. Toronto: George
H. Doran, 1927.
Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media.” ELH 59.2 (1992):
467-93.
Wilkins-Freeman, Mary E. “Luella Miller.” 1903. Ryan 175-87.
X.L. “A Kiss of Judas.” 1894. Frayling 221-50
X. Extra Bibliography:
The following items are presented to you because they are frequently referred
to in studies of vampire literature. You may like to consult them for your
further studies.
Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death. Binghamton: Vail-Ballou, 1988.
Davenport-Hines, Richard. “This man belongs to me I want him.” Gothic: Four
Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. New York: North Point,
1998. 228-65.
Summers, Montague. Vampire: His Kith and Kin. 1928. Whitefish: Kessinger.
---. Vampire and Vampirism. 1928.
9