True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
-
Chiara Battisti
Chiara Battisti is Researcher of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Verona. Her research interest include literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on literature and cinema, literature and science, law and literature, gender studies and fashion studies. Chiara Battisti is a member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura).
Abstract
This essay aims at highlighting the different cultural and metaphorical outcomes introduced by the vampire as created by Bram Stoker and by postmodern re-readings of the vampire, with a particular focus on the novels The Southern Vampire Mysteries and the American Tv series True Blood which is the transposition of the novels. The preliminary statement of this essay is that the law is a recurrent theme within Gothic literature; the figure of the vampire (canonized by Bram Stoker's Dracula) metonymically stands for the uncertainty of a foreign legal system as opposed to the rationality of the English legal system. Moving to the postmodern age, I will analyse the contemporary manifestation of the Gothic imagination, by focusing on the figure of the vampire, within the context of an encounter with poststructuralist theory and the politics of postmodernity. If Dracula is, from a legal and a social viewpoint, a bounded and controlled entity and identity because he is the only one of his species and, as such, has no other options but to adapt to society itself, in the contemporary rereading of the vampire offered by The Southern Vampire Mysteries and True Blood, the vampire epitomizes the dialogue and relation between cultural diversities. The novels and the Tv series, in becoming a metaphorical reflection on issues linked to multiculturalism, help us reconfigure and redevelop problems of multiculturalism in order to suit changing conditions and create an overarching set of rules and regulations that are free from the disadvantages of one-sidedness or arbitrariness. The undertaking of elaborating normative recommendations capable of transcending the barriers of culture, race and religion seems to be full of intellectual, political and legal dangers, since it could be problematic to use conceptual frameworks created by one culture (human culture) to describe and evaluate the reality of another (vampiric culture).
About the author
Chiara Battisti is Researcher of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Verona. Her research interest include literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on literature and cinema, literature and science, law and literature, gender studies and fashion studies. Chiara Battisti is a member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica) and of AIDEL (Associazione Italiana Diritto e Letteratura).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture
- State v. Estate: Jane Austen and the Law of Inheritance
- Women, Property and Identity in Victorian Legal Culture: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
- Interrelations Between Law and Culture: Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games
- Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
- For a New Semantics of Differences: Cultural Exception and the Law
- True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
- Research
- Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law
- Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
- Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
- Defining Legal Vagueness: A Contradiction in Terms?
- Book Review
- Book Review
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Law, Literature and (Popular) Culture
- State v. Estate: Jane Austen and the Law of Inheritance
- Women, Property and Identity in Victorian Legal Culture: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
- Interrelations Between Law and Culture: Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games
- Working at the Intersection of the Humanities, Law and Technology: Digital Humanities and the ``Two Cultures''
- For a New Semantics of Differences: Cultural Exception and the Law
- True Blood: Multicultural Vampires in Contemporary Society
- Research
- Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law
- Modernity, Experience, and the Law in The Education of Henry Adams
- Violation of Human Rights in Holocaust/Post-Holocaust Era
- Defining Legal Vagueness: A Contradiction in Terms?
- Book Review
- Book Review
