The Vampire Tale: A Nightmare History of England in the Nineteenth Century

The Vampire Tale, by Alok Bhalla, is not an anecdotal account of popular texts about vampires. Instead, the book is a scholarly and imaginative analysis of why many fictional works in England used vampiric motifs to think about the problem of evil in human beings and inequality in society. Bhalla suggests that vampire stories are disturbing because they are structured out of the unresolved conflicts between ethics and politics, freedom and labour, eroticism and power that were being discussed extensively in the Romantic and Victorian age. The vampire legend, Bhalla argues, offers a non-redemptive, nightmare history of the moral, social and political conditions England between 1750 and the end of the nineteenth century. The book opens with a brief survey of a few major moral, political and psychological reasons that inform the vampire lore. The two original and complex sections that follow show how the vampire myth is invoked in the works of Lord Byron, John Polidori, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Preskett Prest, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and others to examine issues of sexuality, law and religion. In the final section, Bhalla demonstrates that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is simultaneously a novel of supernatural terror and a visionary account of late Victorian London as a city of affliction and dread. Bhalla’s thesis is that the vampire tale is the product of a dark imagination that sees nothing but horror at the heart of things as they are and finds no rationally coherent explanation for it. About the Author Alok Bhalla is a widely published critic, translator and poet. In 2023, he received the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature Award for Literature. His publications include The Gita and The Mahabharata: Paintings from Late 17th Century Mewar by Allah Baksh, with C.P. Deval (5 volumes), Stories about the Partition of India (4 volumes), Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home and Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto. He has translated Kunwar Narain’s Kumarajiva: A Buddhist Monk on the Silk Road, Dharamvir Bharati’s, Andha Yug, Nirmal Verma’s, Dark Dispatches, Intizar Husain’s, A Chronicle of the Peacocks (with Vishwamitter Adil) and Day and Dastan (with Nishat Zaidi), as well as, the works of Kedarnath Singh, K. B. Vaid, Bhisham Sahni, Asghar Wajahat, Gulzar, etc. Bhalla has published two books on Latin American literature, and edited Yatra: Writings form the Indian Subcontinent (6 volumes) and Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing (5 volumes). His writings have appeared in Journal of Peasant Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Bombay Literary Review, Social Scientist, EPW, Annual of Urdu Studies, Indian Literature, Toronto Review, Kunapipi, Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians, etc. He has also served as the Convener of the English Board of the Sahitya Akademi.…