THE SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTIONOF THE MONSTROUS – THE ELIZABETH BATHORY STORY
This article analyzes several kinds of monsters in western popular culture today: werewolves, vampires, morlaks, the blood-countess and other creatures of the underworld. By utilizing the notion of the monstrous, it seeks to return to the most fundamental misconception of ethnocentrism: the prevailing nodes of western superiority in which tropes seem to satisfy curiosities and fantasies of citizens who should know better but in fact they do not. The monstrous became staples in western popular cultural production and not only there if we take into account the extremely fashionable Japanese and Chinese vampire and werewolf fantasy genre as well. In the history of East European monstrosities, the story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory has a prominent place. Proclaimed to be the most prolific murderess of mankind, she is accused of torturing young virgins, tearing the flesh from their living bodies with her teeth and bathing in their blood in her quest for eternal youth. The rise and popularity of the Blood Countess (Blutgräfin), one of the most famous of all historical vampires, is described in detail. In the concluding section, examples are provided how biology also uses vampirism and the monstrous in taxonomy and classification.
Key words: scholarship; monstrosity; vampirism; blood-countess; Elizabeth Bathory
Nar. umjet. 46/1, 2009, pp. 133-159,
L. Kürti, The Symbolic Construction of the Monstruous…
Original scientific paper Received: 2nd Jan. 2009 Accepted: 15th Feb. 2009UDK 392.28:291.13]
133
LÁSZLÓ KÜRTIUniversity of Miskolc, Miskolc
Original scientific paper Received: 2nd Jan. 2009 Accepted: 15th Feb. 2009UDK 392.28:291.13]
133
LÁSZLÓ KÜRTIUniversity of Miskolc, Miskolc
Review Essay:The Proliferating Undead
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Vol. 19, No. 3,
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
Copyright © 2008, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
Abbott, Stacey.
Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World.
Austin:University of Texas Press, 2007. 266 pp. Soft cover. ISBN 9780292716964.$24.95.Bak, John S., ed.
Post/Modern Dracula: From Victorian Themes to PostmodernPraxis.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007. 162 pp. Hardcover.ISBN 9781847182005. $49.99.Keyworth, David.
Troublesome Corpses: Vampires & Revenants from Antiquity to the Present.
Essex: Desert Island Books Limited, 2007. 320 pp. ISBN9781905328307. £30.McClelland, Bruce A.
Slayers and Their Vampires: ACultural History of Killing the Dead.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 260 pp. Softcover. ISBN 9780472069231. $19.95.
As Stephen D. Arata observes in his seminal essay on Dracula , “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” what marks the vampire in Stoker’s vampire ur-text is his monstrous fecundity.
What Dracula does and aspires to do (much to the dismay of Stoker’s “Crew of Light,” to borrow from Christopher Craft) is to procreate, to create more vampires—a premise that has been elaborated upon to the point of absurdity in twentieth- and twenty-first century vampire fiction and film (if everyone is a vampire, what's left to eat?). A hallmark of the vampire tradition in fiction and cinema is thus the anxiety of the living over the potential proliferation of the undead. But vampires seem to breed more vampires wherever they go.
Blood Spirits: A Jungian Approach to the Vampire Myth
282 Pages
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Possibly Oriental elements in Slavonic folklore. Upiór ~ wampir
2017, M. Németh, B. Podolak and M. Urban (ed.). Essays in the history of languages and linguistics. Dedicated to Marek Stachowski on the occasion of his 60th birthday
58 Pages
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