Masquerading from the Periphery: Literary and Visual Representations of Performative Vampiric Corporeality in the Anglo-American Gothic Tradition, 1816 - 2013

What might one make of the contemporary vampire\u27s tentative assimilation into the mainstream, as opposed to Dracula\u27s antiquated vampirism? Does the vampire\u27s corporeal permutation reflect progress and freedom from old prejudices or is it, ultimately, a beautifully pre-packaged illusion? These are questions that this dissertation attempts to answer by examining the figure of the vampire in written and visual texts of British and American writers from the nineteenth century to the present. In contrast to readings in the dominant critical tradition that figure the vampiric body only as a reflection of its immediate historical and cultural context, my intention in this dissertation is two-fold: firstly, I argue for a correspondence among various texts and historical periods as well as articulate an interpretive vampire paradigm - collecting recurrent patterns - that better explicates the obsessive historical continuity of the vampire with its idiosyncrasies in Western culture; secondly, a paradigm emphasizing the continuity and not solely the mutability of the vampire allows us not only to generate a unified text about the kind of developments that have been taking place in the Anglo-American space since the nineteenth century, but also to collect the multifarious anxieties and trends specific to Western society during the past two centuries into a more coherent phenomenon. Extending Judith Butler\u27s understanding of gender performativity to include all variables of identity, and replacing these variables and the binaries that they engender with the all-encompassing dichotomy center-periphery that characterizes Western discourses, I analyze how several authors have employed the performative in relation to vampires to understand the kind of negotiations that have transpired between the dominant ideology and marginal values in the Western space since the nineteenth century. By comparing the nineteenth-century hegemonic model to the late twentieth and twenty-first-century responses to cultural and ethnic diversity, I argue that the vampire\u27s adaptive performative body reveals not the evolution of the central ideological apparatus but the way in which otherness or difference is aestheticized, stylized, and sanitized today under the pressures of consumerism and a constant push for multiculturalism, as opposed to how it was uglified in the nineteenth century