Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality - Softcover

Barber, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300048599 ISBN 13: 9780300048599

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1988

Synopsis

In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires and offers the first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. From the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires, his book is fascinating reading.

About this title

From Library Journal:

Barber has written a stimulating, authoritative discourse on the relationship between the historical concepts of vampires in folklore and fiction across the ages and throughout the world. To explain the underlying myraid interment and mourning practices designed to keep the dead at bay, he postulates a universal fear of the"vampire/revenant." Such fear was most probably based on universal lack of knowledge and control over fatal illness and disease, and misinterpretations of the natural (and varied) physical manifestations of death and decay in the human body. A lengthy bibliography accompanies the text. Best for academics, but for interested general readers too. Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred, N.Y.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0300048599
• ISBN 13: 9780300048599
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 244