Abstract
The second half of the 1930s saw the release of two novels which revolutionized and localized the two iterations of the trope of the undead – the strigoi and the vampire – which have existed in Romanian literature since the late nineteenth century: Mircea Eliade’s Domnișoara Christina [Miss Christina] (1936) and G.M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu’s Vampirul [The Vampire] (1938). In my paper, I examine how these two works transformed the prevailing paradigms of the rural strigoi and urban vampire. In his novel, Eliade presents a departure from the conventional monstrous depiction of the strigoi in early twentieth-century Romanian literature. Instead, the character of Miss Christina is portrayed as an aristocratic figure endowed with vampiric seductive powers, which ensnare the peasant revolutionaries. In the case of Amza and Bilciurescu’s Vampirul, the villain similarly deviates from the norm of the urban vampire imposed by the period’s literary and journalistic discourse, and becomes a malevolent country priest who instills fear in his increasingly industrialized community. Through a comparative analysis of a selection of notable scenes and episodes in the two novels, my paper reveals that, rather than accentuating the division between a provincial strigoi and an urban vampire, the two works, the first ones to feature such antagonists, share, in fact, a similar perspective of the trope: the undead as the embodiment of the threat posed to a Romanian society aspiring towards modernity by a prolonged feudal order.
Presenters
Anca Simina MartinAssistant Professor, Department of Anglo-American and German Studies, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Gothic, Horror, Undead, Romania, Strigoi, Vampire
