This book examines how the vampire has always been connected to ideas of infection, pollution and disease—even more so in the 21st century where it expresses the horrors of unseen and unstoppable disease and the foreboding and anxiety that accompany viral outbreaks and wider epidemics. Here the vampire gives physical form to the contagion and associated anxieties around the perceived causes and spread of disease, where it can take on many forms from animal to pestilential particulate matter, creeping shadows and even malignant weather systems. If blood is life, it is the body of the vampire that is death. This timely study looks at how and why the vampire continues to fulfil this function and posits that the true patient zero in the 21st century is no longer the dangerous, ancient, outsider from the East but is the undying monster that is Western culture itself.
Simon Bacon
Contagion and the Vampire
The Vampiric Body as Locus of Disease and Global Epidemics in 21st Century
Contagion and the Vampire
The Vampiric Body as Locus of Disease and Global Epidemics in 21st Century
Language English ● Format PDF ● Pages 104 ● ISBN 9783031392023 ● File size 2.1 MB ● Publisher Springer International Publishing ● City Cham ● Country CH ● Published 2023 ● Downloadable 24 months ● Currency EUR ● ID 9119852 ● Copy protection Social DRM