Hi. My name is Martha and I'll be talking about Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice and how the Vampires in the book are different from the other vampires from the genre. So we can spend hours discussing the many differences in Rice's Vampires but I'll concentrate on the biggest points as I only have few minutes.
So while Anne Rice wasn't the first to write about vampires, she introduce a lot of new characteristics. Before her the most popular vampire in fiction was Dracula. Vampires back then were seen as these "other" creatures, as villains. But with Rice, the narration changed and while we still see them as "others" and different, we sympathize with them. Instead of them being the villain of the story like they are in Dracula or in Carmilla,
For example, in the article “Vampire Gentlemen and Zombie Beasts: A Rendering of True Monstrosity” by Tenga and Zimmerman, it shows the difference between vampires and zombies over time: “As Natalie Wilson notes, today’s vampires is ‘a lonely immortal longing for love, family, and approval’” (76). This quote shows how vampires have become more adaptive to human nature. They live for love, with the feeling of a human being, and wanting to be a part of our society. In addition, Tenga and Zimmerman also state: “Unlike Dracula, who inhabited a dilapidated castle, these vampires enjoy an opulent lifestyle, and perhaps more importantly, the accoutrements that represent their way of life can be purchased” (81). This shows that vampires have become more advanced in the way they live. In other words, they have abandoned their monstrous characteristics and inhumanity in order to preserve their kind.
Fahrenheit 451 is a very interesting book that shows its many themes in different ways. Through a compare and contrast between the our world now and the world presented in Fahrenheit 451 we will be able to see the different themes and the factors that influence them. The four main factors that influence the story are the controlling government, terrible social conditions, advances technology and censorship. Although, some a play a bigger part than others, without all the them the book 's final outcome could have changed in a drastic way.
Throughout life we all encounter love and the crazy things it made us all go through. The majority of people have said, at one time or another, “I can’t go on without so and so” or “There is nobody out there like so and so.” Some individuals have even gone to the point of committing crimes or hurting each other/themselves. The overpowering force of love is an exertion of control that takes over our emotions. This force causes us to act, think, feel, and do things that we would normally not do. But what if you add “power” into the equation? The power to control or make someone fall in love with them, and be their significant other? In the novel Kindred, by Octavia Butler, Rufus learns this the hard way, after inheriting power over slaves; he was caught between love and reality. Where Alice, the one Rufus loved, was in love with another man; but Rufus being the slave owner, had the power to make her love him…or so he thought.
By presenting Count Dracula as an evil, demonic being, the story is therefore laid out as a fight between good and evil. Contrastively, the vampires in I Am Legend are not physically described in as much detail, but rather the details and attention are focused on their behaviour and their origin. The horror aspects of these vampires are pushed to the side and the readers are made to focus solely on their threatening presence as they prowl around at night and hunt for Neville while he, in turn, tries to discover what the specific virus that infected the world and caused the vampire epidemic. These differences are key in setting up how the readers respond to the novels’ plot and themes.
The authors do an excellent job in showing how vampires are much like the human. They adapt as the human evolves through the scientific evolution. “The vampire is as flexible and polyvalent as ever” It shows how the vampire arose from imagination yet without it, it would be difficult to remind oneself that there are other things in the world unexplainable and unknown to the human
Vampires are very present in today’s society. Many novels and shows, like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, show that vampires are still integral to our culture. However, the birth of such a cultural phenomenon would not have happened without Dracula. Without Bram Stoker’s novel, there would be no stereotypical vampires that capture the culture’s conscious. Aside from telling a story on vampires, Dracula also explores ideals about the women of the time in which it was written, which is the Victorian Era.
In Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale all of the women, in a new society called Gilead, are stripped from their everyday way of living. Their freedom, and most importantly their identity, is taken from them, and it is as if America has gone back in time to where there are no women’s rights. Now the women cannot think freely, read, or do as they please. The women cannot even wear their own clothes. They are all assigned to wear a certain color of robe all with a different meaning.
The vampire is an embodiment of society 's deepest fears. Throughout literary history, the vampire has always been characterised as a vile figure of pure evil. However the depiction of the vampire is affected by the social, historical and political context of the time. As context shifts, so does the collective fear of society, with the portrayal of the vampire following suit. Dracula, I Am Legend and Twilight, three extremely popular books of vampire fiction created during vastly different periods in history, are representative of this shift. In Dracula, the titular character is depicted as an anti-christ figure by the author, Bram Stoker, who attempts to warn people about the dangers of straying from traditional Christian ideals. I Am Legend, a nineteen-fifties post-apocalyptic novel, emphasises the dangers of a world ravaged by environmental destruction. The wasteland, that was once earth, becomes populated by animalistic, brutal vampires that have been created as a result of an environmental plague. Finally, Twilight is a teen-angst novel written by Stephenie Meyer in 2005 and adapted into a movie of the same name in 2008. In a day and age where more people have begun to adopt humanitarian views, society has put a strong emphasis on rehabilitation and redemption. Contrary to this ideology, Edward Cullen, the main vampire, has a deeply ingrained fear that he is beyond saving thus reflecting society 's fears that one can inherently be beyond redemption.
Anne Rice writes the chilling novel, Interview with the Vampire, which tells the story of two distinct vampire characters. Throughout the novel Rice makes the reader question their own philosophical views by pairing two characters that are the parallel opposites of each other. Louis has a Conventional Catholic Morality which incorporates traditional views into a belief system and Lestat has a Aesthetic/ Practical Belief System which includes less traditional views and is influenced by the time period. Throughout the novel there are many comparisons between both philosophical view points. Louis believes that some actions are desirable and others are undesirable by means of classifying them in the categories of good or evil.
Anne Rice has written many vampire books, including The Vampire Chronicles and she has inspired many different kinds of readers (“Anne Rice Wikipedia,” 2017). She has also written the New Tales of a vampire series, which is about a fledgling vampire, David Talbot, who finds out the history of Pandora, a two-thousand-year-old vampire, and in fifteenth-century
“We're beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we're merciless killers”; Lestat’s opinion of the vampires’ beauty and strength in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. Vampires have branched off from just some monster people disguise themselves as during Halloween and have slowly crawled their way into modern day media; constantly reappearing in many books and have many television shows based on them. People have always been fascinated by vampires because of their beauty, powerful persona, and eternal life. Another thing vampires have often been adored for is their timeless beauty; their beauty is constantly referenced to in books and in movies.
I have enjoyed many vampire movies over the years, long before they became the popular pop-culture genre they have become due to the success of The Twilight Saga films. One movie I have enjoyed viewing many times since its debut in 1994 is Interview with the Vampire. This film is an adaptation of the book Interview with the Vampire written by Anne Rice in 1973 and published in 1976. The movie was directed by Neil Jordan who also co-wrote the script with Anne Rice.
Charismatic. Charming. Sensual. Beautiful. Would you ever use these adjectives to describe a vampire? The common theme in portraying vampires in literature has always involved depictions of great violence, ugliness, and fear. Novels involving vampires never portrayed the vampire as a heroic character, but rather as the villain who was then destroyed in the end. Stereotypical vampires terrorized towns, lived in grim, dark, towering castles and turned into bats when in trouble. Authors were simply not inspired to build a tale around the life of a vampire, his shortcomings, his doubts, his fears. Rather, authors used the vampire as a metaphor for evil that resides in humanity.
For people who forgot or don’t know about these two novels, these novels are about the lives of vampires. The Vampire Chronicles (1976-2003) is by Anne Rice. Her novels are series that tells the story of a French nobleman named Lestate de Lioncourt who transformed into a vampire in the eighteenth century. The other novel series, The Twilight Saga, is by Stephenie Meyer. Her novel series tells a story of a young ordinary female, Bella Swan, who falls in love with a vampire named Edward Cullen. Both of these novel series has turned into the big screen including Interview with a Vampire, Queen of the Damned, and the Twilight movie series that almost every teenage girl loves. Even though they might tell
The novel Interview with the Vampire1 by Anne Rice is one of the first books to differ widely from Dracula. With Louis, Rice created a more humanized and romanticized vampire.2 His character raises philosophical questions concerning life, what happens after it and if there is a god, which are matters mostly humans reflect upon.3 He refuses to feed on humans because he has a guilty conscience about hurting humans and lives of the blood of animals instead. This shows that he has to have a soul and is therefore not damned, which is also a major difference to prior vampire novels. While not all the vampires in the book refuse to drink human blood, all of them have inner conflicts. Lestat, for example, creates a small family out of vampires because