Geo-political vampirism: how and why has Western literary scholarship appropriated and then re-mythologised the socio-historical origins of the vampire?

Abstract

The article considers the claims of Western academics like Frayling (1992) that the literary vampire began with Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). Crawford (2016) identifies a German literary vampire tradition existing one hundred years before Polidori, yet that work has strengthened Eurocentric claims concerning the literary vampire by academics like Bloom (2018). The article reviews Anatol’s (2022) challenge to the dominant position of Dracula in vampire criticism, Anatol identifying a literary tradition pre-dating Stoker, that tradition seeing the documenting of Caribbean vampire folklore by British colonialists/slave owners, travel writers and journalists. In sympathy with Anatol’s non-Eurocentric consideration, the article re-examines/disputes Western academia’s ‘mythology’ concerning the Villa Diodati (1816), when Lord Byron’s reading from the German Fantasmagoriana apparently inspired Polidori and Mary Shelley to write their novels. The article identifies an Ottoman literary tradition that directly influenced Byron’s 1813 poem ‘The Giaour’, his unfinished story ‘A Fragment’ (1819), and Stoker’s Dracula. The article explores Ottoman vampire (‘obur’) literature, starting with Celebi’s Book of Travels of 1666, which refers back to the fifteenth century ‘vampire fatwas’ in the Balkans under Ottoman rule. The article traces how the dominant Turkic languages of the region informed the proto-Albanian language, the ‘vampire’ (as both term and demonised ‘other’) entering Albanian folklore. The Ottoman empire declining, the rising Austro-Hungarian and then British empires appropriated the vampire westward, exoticising and demonising non-central Europeans. Finally, the article provides a post-colonial reading of Southey’s 1801 orientalist poem Thalaba the Destroyer, reading the first true ‘vampire’ in English literature.