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February 05, 2007
"Not Your Mother's Vampire: Vampires in Young Adult Fiction" by Deborah Wilson Overstreet
“Not Your Mother’s Vampire: Vampires in Young Adult Fiction,” by Deborah Wilson Overstreet is a scholarly discussion of vampire literature geared to young adults. Overstreet includes information about the classic adult vampire fiction, both novels such as The Vampyre (1819) and Dracula (1897) and movies including Nosferatu (1922) and Dracula (1931 and later), and modern classics such as Anne Rice novels. She compares and contrasts the modern young adult vampire novels to these ten classic adult samples. The book includes information on the history of vampire tales, the classic vampire conventions (such as whether or not vampires can see their reflections, be affected by religious objects such as crosses, need an invitation to enter a victim’s home, etc.), and covers several types of vampire tales: becoming a vampire, stories of power negotiations, and romances. There is also a chapter devoted completely to “Buffyverse” the worlds of the Buffy and Angel tv series and their characters. The author teaches a course on Buffy Studies at the University of Maine at Farmington. Although interesting, easy to read, and with a lot of cited sources for further research, the book is very repetitive. It reads almost as if several stand alone journal articles had been strung together into one book since the same ground is plowed over, and over again (but from different perspectives).
ISBN: 0-8108-5365-5
Pam, reserves
Posted by jnardine at February 5, 2007 08:17 AM