El vampiro

Three centuries after a vampiric outbreak terrorized central Europe and two centuries after Polidori's The Vampyre burst onto the literary scene, comes this new story about the vampire, tracing its origins to a time and place: 1725. , on the eastern borders of the Habsburg Empire. A series of terrifying supernatural events caught the attention of doctors, scientists, and theologians from across the continent, which crystallized in the clash between the nascent rationality of the Enlightenment and traditional Balkan folklore. The investigation that derived from those facts was a subject of popular fascination, long before even poets and writers were also prey to a "vampiromania" that reached its peak in 1897 with Bram Stoker's Dracula. In this new story about the vampire, Nick Groom, a professor of English literature at the Universities of Exeter and Macau and an expert in Gothic literature, unearths the complex story of a fictional creature become an icon, from early medical attempts to substantiate the legend, to the superstitions of the blood and the body, the sources about Dracula or its relevance in contemporary popular culture. In this fascinating journey, Groom demonstrates that the vampire has always served to defy convention, and that is why he currently stands as an antihero wielded by the marginalized and excluded. Fictional creature, have we said?