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if anyone is going to get a physical copy, be aware that the version with Carmen Maria Machado as editor presents itself as a straightforward work of scholarship but is actually a "playful" postmodern exercise in not letting readers in on the joke. It has an introduction and footnotes throughout which are entirely fictionalized, denigrate Le Fanu for a crime he didn't commit (because Machado made it up to suit the metanarrative in the introduction/footnotes) and exist to bravely posit the novel idea: "what if Carmilla ... were about lesbians???"
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Oct 4, 2022 12:56
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to ‘reclaim’ the story or the characters from a modern queer perspective … I’ve got no objection to the imaginative exercise, but the book (unless it’s been updated in later printings) contains no indication outside of the essential absurdity of its metanarrative (which will not be evident to a lay reader) that it has been fictionalized at all and that is what makes me balk: i catalogued it for a library and in trying to ascertain whether we were going to classify it under Le Fanu or Machado due to the new elements, I found so many reviews online by people who, oblivious to the tells and winks she put in, were like: “Wow can’t believe Le Fanu stole this story and gave no credit to the real life inspirations, and also turned one of them into a vampire because he hated lesbians. Very important and eye-opening piece of scholarship, thank god for Carmen Maria Machado’s investigative work that finally allows these women’s stories to be told” it’s so irresponsible
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Oct 4, 2022 15:57
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AngusPodgorny posted:Although based on having also read Lair of the White Worm, maybe Bram Stoker just wasn’t a good writer. it’s this lol AngusPodgorny posted:
Le Fanu, at least in his best stories, is a fan of leaving dangling threads and of creating unease through implication and ambiguity. I may be mistaken and forgetting something in this particular story, but—I’m fairly certain the unresolved matter of Carmilla’s retinue is left mysterious for this purpose. Truly, the Dark Souls of horror fi Bonaventure fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Oct 5, 2022 |
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Oct 5, 2022 03:34
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The Vampire Lovers loving rules
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Oct 5, 2022 17:36
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By the way, Augustin Calmet's treatise sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires ou les revenants de Hongrie, de Moravie, &c, mentioned above as an influence on Carmilla, was published in English under the very lame sounding title "The Phantom World." i can't find the copy i have listed on amazon so won't vouch for any of the physical editions i see there, but it's available at gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29412. despite the title, vampires really only come into the fore in the second volume. particularly interesting is the firsthand and skeptical account of the exhumation of a vampiric corpse related by M. de Tournefort (a traveler in Greece) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29412/29412-h/29412-h.htm#Page_304 Bonaventure fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Oct 6, 2022 |
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Oct 6, 2022 18:35
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^e;fbMcSpankWich posted:About half way done, good so far! I didn't realize there was a vampire story prior to Dracula so I'm excited to finish up there's quite a lot of vampire fiction that predates Dracula, although Carmilla is probably the best. while there's one or two minor works that predate the following, the real craze for vampires in fiction began in 1819 with Polidori's novella "The Vampyre," available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6087/6087-h/6087-h.htm. It kind of sucks, but it was massively popular and established a ton of tropes attached to literary vampires (as opposed to folkloric vampires, with which they have very little in common) ever since; and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that every subsequent "vampire" story has Polidori's tale in its DNA. The Vampyre's genesis actually took place during the same Shelly/Byron get-together that spawned 'Frankenstein,' with Byron starting and aborting a vampire story that was later picked up by his doctor, Polidori. Polidori and Byron had a falling out by this time, and so Polidori modeled the villainous vampire in the story after Lord Byron--transparently so--as a way of getting back at him. Everyone recognized Byron in the story as the vampire; Polidori even used the name Ruthven, a known alias of Byron. To capitalize on this, the publishers cravenly advertised it as being a story by Byron, which he denie;d but the damage was already done and the misconception that it was Byron's story continued for years. Without getting credit for his massively successful story, Polidori languished in obscurity and killed himself a few years later. His attempt to get back at Byron by calling him a vampire was also a huge backfire. The character in the story is dark, brooding, mysterious, handsome, dangerous, rich, aristocratic; and Polidori is there pointing at this smoldering immortal hottie and going "Why does everyone like this jerk?" while every woman in Victorian England is too busy creaming themselves over the brooding, mysterious, handsome, dangerous, aristocratic immortal to care. When I said earlier that the story was popular, I mean they made multiple operas throughout Europe based on it that ran for years and years. "Lord Ruthven" was to them what "Count Dracula" is to us, and the latter owes many of his characteristics to the former. When discussing antecedents to Dracula, I must also mention a German story, possibly by Karl von Wachsmann, written somewhere between 1844-1854, which did appear in English at that latter date under the title "The Mysterious Stranger." By "antecedent" I mean that he, uh, practically plagiarized parts of it. For instance, the story opens with a carriage being pursued by wolves as it careens through the narrow paths of the Carpathian mountains. The carriage reaches the outskirts of a ruined castle and the wolves surround it, only for a preternaturally tall figure to emerge from that place, with piercing grey eyes, who commands the wolves to depart with an imperious wave of his arm. Like, come on. The only source of the full text I can find online is sadly a .fandom site, but: https://souo.fandom.com/wiki/Full_Text:_Mysterious_Stranger.
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Oct 7, 2022 15:54
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Robo Reagan posted:I'm surprised how quickly the book wraps up. The general spends all of like two pages to arrive at the graveyard and get to staking. He doesn't gently caress around. drat straight  all the people pleasantly surprised by how good Carmilla is should also check out Le Fanu's story "Schalken the Painter" mentioned in the OP, which is maybe my personal favorite of his. it's very short and also involves a revenant who loves to gently caress https://gutenberg.readingroo.ms/1/1/6/9/11699/11699-h/11699-h.htm [there's actually two versions of the story since Le Fanu revised it between 1839 and 1851: an annotated version noting the revisions can be found here for those with academic interest, but it's probably not great for pleasure-reading: https://editions.covecollective.org/edition/strange-event-life-schalken-painter]
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Oct 15, 2022 13:56
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