Contemporary vampire literature uses a bloodsucking monster to play with continually shifting social boundaries, to try on new identities, and to refract our world in a different, fantastic context. It has been widely acknowledged that from the later twentieth century onward, the vampire has become “humanised”: it has become a sympathetic figure that is no longer necessarily or definitively evil. This thesis argues that since the 1980s, the vampire has developed in new ways as a posthuman figure. A vital concern has emerged over the increasingly problematic distinction between the human and the vampire, and the ways in which vampires and humans might interrelate. This concern is most clearly elaborated in relation to how and upon whom the vampire feeds. Taking a posthumanist and feminist theoretical position, the thesis traces the ways in which representations of vampiric feeding have changed in recent decades, thereby identifying how the boundaries between the vampire and the human have been contested and renegotiated in new ways in recent vampire literature.
As a response to and interrogation of the dramatic social shifts of the posthuman era, twenty-first-century vampire literature has divided into two popular strands. The first, dominant strand, urban fantasy and paranormal romance, embraces the posthuman vampire and celebrates its potential to forge symbiotic, mutually beneficial connections between the human and the monstrous. The second, less prominent strand, the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative, rejects the posthuman vampire, suggesting that this vampire is an atavistic evil, a harbinger of the disasters that must result when humans and monsters align and intertwine. In both these strands, the fragility of the boundaries that divide the self from the Other is foregrounded through transgressive acts of vampiric feeding. In analysing vampiric feeding, the thesis thus elucidates some of the ways that vampires in recent literature refract contemporary sociocultural anxieties about shifting conceptions of the self and the Other.
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