The Vampire: A Casebook [Hardcover]

Alan Dundes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 24, 1998

    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 with a penchant for drinking blood.
    The Vampire: A Casebook takes this legend out of the realm of literature and film and back to its dark beginnings in folk traditions. The essays examine the history of the word “vampire;” Romanian vampires; Greek vampires; Serbian vampires; the physical attributes of vampires; the killing of vampires; and the possible psychoanalytic underpinnings of vampires. Much more than simply a scary creature of the human imagination, the vampire has been and continues to haunt the lives of all those who encounter it—in reality or in fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Dundes (The Walled-Up Wife, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1996) presents a collection of essays by renowned folklorists (Friedrich Krauss, Juliette du Boulay, Paul Barber, and others) in an attempt to explain and define the tradition of the vampire outside the context of literature and legend. He begins with essays discussing the etymology of the term vampire and its history and ethnography. More in-depth essays follow, with analyses of Romanian and other Slavic vampire folklore. One work treating forensic pathology attempts to explain how "folk" might easily see the natural process of bodily decomposition as vampirism. Another discusses the psychology of clinical vampirism, and a final essay by the editor, with an admitted Freudian bias, tries to weave together the strands of legend and reality. Recommended for academic and public libraries with strong folklore collections but also valuable as a literary companion.?Katherine K. Koenig, Ellis Sch., Pittsburgh
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“The Vampire is a winner. . . Alan Dundes is a truly remarkable scholar.”—Wolfgang Mieder, professor of German and folklore and author of The Politics of Proverbs

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 182 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (September 24, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299159205
• ISBN-13: 978-0299159207
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,786,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eleven scholars unearth the legend., November 5, 1998

By 

WD Grissom (Cabot, Arkansas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Vampire: A Casebook (Paperback)

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.)

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent collection of academic perspectives on vampires, November 4, 2000

By 

AmazingMrKimble "amazingmrkimble" (Rio Rancho, New Mexico, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Vampire: A Casebook (Paperback)

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.

9 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars interesting book, November 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Vampire: A Casebook (Hardcover)

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.