Dracula's Older Gayer Cousins

Count Dracula wasn’t the first literary vampire, not even close! Rebecca and Hannah travel back to the 19th century to look at the vampire poems, short stories, and novels that came before Bram Stoker’s masterpiece. They talk about the scandalous relationships of Lord Byron, the canon of female vampires, the homosexual undercurrent of tales going back to 1810, and how these works set Dracula up for success.

Come vamps, join us around the campfire.

CW: brief mentions of suicide

Major Spoilers:

* “The Vampyre” by John Stagg, 1810

* “The Vampyre” by John William Polidori, 1819

* Varney the Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Ryder and Thomas Pickett Prest, 1845-1847

* “Manor” by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, 1885

* Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872

* Dracula by Bram Stoker, 1897

Other media mentioned in this episode:

Poetry

* “The Bride of Corinth” by Goethe, 1797

* “Thalaba the Destroyer” by Robert Southey, 1801

* “The Giaour: Fragment of a Turkish Tale” by Lord Byron, 1813

Fiction

* Glenarvon by Caroline Lamb, 1816

* Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, 1818

* “The Mysterious Stranger” by Karl Von Wachsmann, 1844

* Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith, 2010

TV

* “Are You Afraid of the Drunk?,” Drunk History, 2019

Additional Reading

* William Veeder, “Carmilla: The Arts of Repression,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22, no. 2 (1980)

* Marjorie Howes, “The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and Self-Expression in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30, no. 1 (1988)

* Lloyd Whorley, “Loving Death: The Meaning of Male Sexual Impotence in Vampire Literature,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2, no. 1 (1989)

* Talia Schaffer, “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” ELH 61, no. 2 (1994)

* Elizabeth Signorotti, “Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in Carmilla and Dracula,” Criticism 38, no. 4 (1996)

* Sarah Sceats, “Oral Sex: Vampiric Transgression and the Writing of Angela Carter,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 20, no. 1 (2001)

* Barry McCrea, “Heterosexual Horror: Dracula, the Closet, and the Marriage Plot,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 43, no. 2 (2010)

* Ardeal Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in the Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012)

Don’t miss part two of this series: Are All Vampires a Leetle Gäy?

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This episode was written, recorded, and produced by Rebecca Glazer & Hannah Spiegelman

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