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In this article, I wish to challenge one of the basic assumptions permeating contemporary vampire studies concerning the exclusivity of the category of 'vampire' for the analysis of modern European lore. To do so, I deploy the concepts of the 'vampire' (a literary figure of a tragic, undead aristocrat feeding on blood) and 'horror' (a narrative evoking fear, repulsion and fascination) as heuristic devices to the study of biblical accounts. Specifically, I examine the Old Testament passages featuring the Hebrew term rephaim which denotes one of the Canaanite tribes ('Rephaites') and the inhabitants of the underworld ('revenants'). The analyses of the Scriptural sources against their Ugaritic background prove the adequateness of these heuristic devices: the texts exhibit formal features prompting the experience of awe and terror and portray the rephaim as a semi-divinized undead aristocracy. The adoption of this theoretical and methodological framework permits the further exploration of biblical vampires, while in the overarching scope, the hereby proposed vampire complex can serve as a potent tool to be deployed in a variety of other non-European sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction offers a way into Punk & Post-Punk's Special Issue on 'Goth Histories'. It points to recent traces of the subculture in popular culture and recognises key trends in a relatively vibrant scholarship. The issue was stimulated by a discussion between the two editors as to the whys and wherefores of this at a conference of the Subcultures Network in April 2023. The collected articles hope to give some sense of the different ways by which the Gothic retains a punk-inflected presence into the twenty-first century. Long may it continue to haunt our mindscapes, mediascapes and landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Shibian" is a famous seventeenth-century horror tale by Pu Songling that culminates in a terror-stricken traveler's deadly pursuit by a reanimated corpse. This article explores the tale's close connection to two groups of similar narratives about corpse reanimation, which the author designates as "Temple of Horror" anecdotes and "House of Death" accounts, respectively. Though recognizing "Shibian" as essentially a "House of Death" account, this article argues that a version of "Temple of Horror" also contributed narrative elements that were key to the intricacy and intense horror of Pu Songling's tale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the concept of the labor of the living dead through readings of recent Senegalese films, novels, comics, and music videos in Wolof and French. The undead have been resurgent in cultural production for decades but these are not your average zombies: they do not inspire collective dread nor are they directed by opaque, outside forces. In Senegal, the focus has more often been on the work of the undead. This enigmatic concept speaks to the pervasive and potentially fatal mismatch between discourses of entrepreneurial self-realization and the crushing limitations and dangers imposed on many by their present circumstances. In representations of undead labor, projects of normative self-improvement devour and outlive the selves they are meant to improve, generating affects of shame and powerlessness and sparking violence toward more marginalized lives. Alongside these dynamics, though, the figure of undead work also seems to contain a grain of counter-hegemonic imagination, even affording visions of alternatives to existing configurations of labor and humanity. Central to this phenomenon is a tendency to exploit the polysemy of the Wolof term liggéey, which means work in a conventional sense but which also refers in certain contexts to witchcraft or gendered labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initially, the study Some Observations on European Witchcraft was a communication presented by Mircea Eliade during the "John Nuveen Symposium" organized by the University of Chicago in 1974. A revised version of the text was published a year later in the volume History of Religion. At the beginning of his observations, the mythologist expresses his surprise at the astonishing popularity of witchcraft in modern Western culture. However, the contemporary interest in witchcraft has some peculiarities, being related to "the vogue of occultism and the esoteric-from astrology and pseudo spiritualist movements to Hermetism, alchemy, Zen, Yoga, Tantrism and other Eastern gnoses and techniques". The historian of religions is also fascinated by recent interpretations "related to the origin and evolution of Western witchcraft", especially the issue of witch persecution in the 16th and 17th centuries. In this sense, very well documented, Eliade refers to the studies by researchers like H.R. Trevor-Roper, J.B. Russell and Keith Thomas. They can demonstrate the importance of the debated issue within contemporary historiography. In essence, Mircea Eliade's attention is focused on two controversial aspects: "(1) the "origins" of Western witchcraft, that is, the question of the possible connection with pre-Christian beliefs and rituals; and (2) the so-called witches' orgies which, from the time witchcraft was equated with heresy, were at the center of accusations". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines stylistic change in musical history by comparing the treatment of the same motif, the ill-starred lovers, in a romantic piece, Wieniawski's Legende, Op. 17, and a post-Wagnerian composition by George Enescu: Strigoii (The Undead) Oratory, setting to music Eminescu's homonymous legend, which in its turn, draws on Bidu's Tower legend. Whereas Wieniawski was writing a grieving soul's complaint in the manner of romantic self-expressionism, Enescu was attached to the national poet, to his people's ancient past and to folk legends in the spirit of the neoclassical aesthetics of a part, the most prolific one of musical modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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American Movie Classics' (AMC) popular television series The Walking Dead (2010–present) transports viewers into an apocalyptic zombie dystopia where the lines between safety and precarity, being governed and governing, or being alive and/or dead slip and change. Utilizing Achille Mbembe's term "necropolitics", the article explores The Walking Dead's representation of governance and power in terms of individual and group security. While the zombie has been understood as the liminal figure par excellence, The Walking Dead's non-zombie characters illustrate diasporic liminality as refugees, hovering on or near the threshold of death. The scale of suffering or prosperity is determined by who leads or governs. Frequently, those deemed "in charge" exercise power and control to discipline, to punish, and to provide security. The series offers a metaphor for the potential uses of power in biological, environmental, or natural disaster situations where survivors grapple with scarce resources and the constant presence of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Baudelaire's verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection's necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection's representation of this 'living death' foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as 'social death'. As for the poetic representation of the 'Undead', this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless 'living death' of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire's imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Antropologia Americana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this essay, I try to explicate the recent prominence of texts and films that feature protagonists whose memories have been erased, and particularly who don’t remember their own histories, and especially the paradoxical fact that they have died. These often traumatized figures—who need a designation, and whom we might call the nescient dead (“ND”)—are not zombies; they simply don’t realize that they are dead or exist in a repetitive flux between what Lacan termed the two deaths. Many of these narratives update a Modernist sense of belatedness, reflecting our anxiety that something has already ended, but we haven’t acknowledged it yet.

In Robert Kirkman's graphic novel The Walking Dead (2003–present), a zombie apocalypse serves as the backdrop against which the survivors make the practical and moral decisions that will determine their fate. The struggle is less about combating the undead than maintaining a civilized, moral imperative and reformulating a micro-society from the ashes of previous civilization. Leadership and decisionmaking become critical in situations where the wrong choice can result in destruction. The television adaptation offers a rare glimpse into a world where some of the fundamental features of civilization – government, kinship, culture – are simultaneously and completely enveloped in chaos. In the midst of a complete breakdown of structure, power vacuums occur and are inevitably filled, most notably in the early parts of the series by Rick Grimes and Shane Walsh, friends and former law enforcement officers who model very different visions of power and governance. This article explores power structures and hierarchy in The Walking Dead from two disciplinary perspectives – historical/cultural and psychological – and focuses upon the clash of competing hierarchal structures and leadership styles that develop as the survivors band together and begin to seek out islands of safety from zombies and other humans alike. The zombie apocalypse is thus a backdrop against which to project the real story: the power dynamics within a micro-society undergoing tremendous stress, and what these dynamics indicate about the conflicted nature of power and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the changing position of the village in Polish culture and fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century, Czapliński argues that: 1) the 1990s see a decline in the literary peasant tradition (due to the loss of symbolic and political representation); in its place we get fiction that thematizes the village; 2) in the plot, the double death of the peasant tradition is expressed through the motif of the dying village (depopulation, poverty) as well as the status of the undead (ghosts, spectres) imparted on the village community; 3) only in works of the 2010s, literary representations of the village begin to give rise to new social ties, new methods of production and other narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western Europe, memory studies are marked by an effort to give voice to those silenced by dominant narratives. In Poland, meanwhile, the current ‘memory turn' openly flirts with post-truth and paves the way for a new hegemony. This way of framing memory takes advantage of the poststructuralist humanities' defenceless position, and it gradually appropriates its tools and yokes them to the rhetoric of propaganda. The new project of collective memory breaks with Ricoeur's triad of blocked memory - memory of repetition - obligated memory. It privileges blockage and repetition as modes of commemorating (‘undead memory' - a paradoxical posthumanist realization of the category of the undead). Tokarska-Bakir demonstrates this tendency in a case study on the development of public discourse on the Kielce pogrom of 1946. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In vitro isolated heart preparations are valuable tools for the study of cardiac anatomy and physiology, as well as for preclinical device testing. Such preparations afford investigators a high level of hemodynamic control, independent of host or systemic interactions. Here we hypothesize that recovered human and swine heart-lung blocs can be reanimated using a clear perfusate and elicit viable cardiodynamic and pulmonic function. Further, this approach will facilitate multimodal imaging, which is particularly valuable for the study of both functional anatomy and device-tissue interactions. Five human and 18 swine heart-lung preparations were procured using techniques analogous to those for cardiac transplant. Specimens were then rewarmed and reperfused using modifications of a closed circuit, isolated, beating and ventilated heart-lung preparation. Positive pressure mechanical ventilation was also employed, and epicardial defibrillation was applied to elicit native cardiac sinus rhythm. Videoscopy, fluoroscopy, ultrasound, and infrared imaging were performed for anatomical and experimental study. Results: Systolic and diastolic left ventricular pressures observed for human and swine specimens were 68/2 ± 11/7 and 74/3 ± 17/5 mmHg, respectively, with associated native heart rates of 80 ± 7 and 96 ± 16 beats per minute. High-resolution imaging within functioning human pulmonary vasculature was obtained among other anatomies of interest. Note that one human specimen elicited poor cardiac performance post defibrillation. Conclusions: We report the first dynamic videoscopic images of the pulmonary vasculature during viable cardiopulmonary function in isolated reanimated heart-lung blocs. This experimental approach provides unique in vitro opportunities for the study of novel medical therapeutics applied to large mammalian, including human, heart-lung specimens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep underground on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto, a corporation has been excavating the world's largest nuclear waste repository. Once filled, the site will need to be sealed and left intact for 100,000 years to avoid contamination of the earth's surface. The defences for this massive sarcophagus will need to survive and resist geological or meteorological interruptions, but also human curiosity or treasure hunting. This poses not only an engineering problem but a semiological one: how can a warning sign be written or depicted that will still be decodable for an almost unimaginably remote future? The problem is dramatized when one considers that it only took a generation for the human race to lose the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, and for hieroglyphs to then remain a mystery for 1500 years until a fluke archaeological discovery of the code. Such a warning sign to stop the opening of radioactive tombs also suffers the likely indecipherability of those messages naively engraved on the plaques attached to Discovery spacecraft sent out of the solar system into deep space and deep time, with images of a naked Edenic couple etched into the metal, along with a recording of Bach's third 'Brandenburg Concerto' (which is probably unplayable on even our own technology now). This article will address both the anomaly of these manufactured 'future fossils' and also the eclipse of meaning in pictograms or glyphs from a deep past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from a March 7, 2015 death studies conference in Kassel, Germany hosted by the transmortale VI working group at the Universität Hamburg unbiversity and the Museum für Sepulkralkultur museum. Topics of presentations delivered included the cultural history of the undead and zombies, case studies of stillbirth and childhood death, and the genre of death and grief self-help literature.

Popular superstitions claim that a human-vampire automatically changes after death into a deadundead or a walking corpse, as the nowadays zombies, except when it is freed of death. In the mythical concept the dead- undead has a bigger demonic power than he had in his life. The mythology of death includes an interesting part called demonology which is the most complex one in the Romanian mythology. The explanation is mainly due to the cultural impact that the early migratory peoples had on the native settled Romanians, whose mythology was mainly demonological. As the old magic folk superstitions and beliefs make the sources of all ancient sciences, it is understandable that archaic medicine was nothing but a complex of enigmatic magic formulas. Nations were controlled by the magic of superstitions and popular beliefs which have subjected them through the power of mind. The struggle between the forces of good and evil that last for centuries of civilization made man the slave of popular legitimate or illegitimate superstitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The words 'utopia' and 'zombie' are likely to conjure up strong images in the mind of the reader. The first makes one think of perfection, of happiness, of something new and better; the other, of the monstrous, of death and decay. Despite the fact that these images are arguably the most common, one can question their validity: can it be said that utopias are always perfect, and are the undead always monstrous? In this paper, I aim to explore the concepts relating to both utopias and zombies and the possible connections between the two, including a reading of the undead in light of the ultimate utopia: Paradise. In the light of these analyses, I propose a more positive approach to the figure of the zombie, which will be discussed as a counterpoint to the commonly held views of (religious) utopias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of necromancy is attested both in literature (since Homer) and in 'technical' sources, such as the Greek magical papyri. The actual reanimation of a dead body, however, occurs rather rarely. The only instances in literature appear in Lucan (VI book), in Apuleius' Metamorphoses, and in Heliodorus' novel. Though differing in many ways, these three necromancies exhibit several common features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most powerful romantic poets, John Keats (31 October 1795; London - 23 February 1821; Rome, the Papal States/Italy) continues to amaze generation after generation of readers of poetry. The fascination for Keats has multiple sources, not last among these being the fact that he produced a series of magnificent letters now considered to be among the most beautiful in the English language ever written (a rival in this sense is only maybe Hart Crane's correspondence). Some controversy existed regarding the exact period when his initial illness set in and what the nature thereof really was (the "sore throat" was a symptom of a laryngeal tuberculosis, tuberculosis of the lungs or simply a chronic tonsilitis?). In the 20th century these matters have been tackled more professionally, but the answers offered are not definitive. In the present paper we propose, in the larger context of Keats studies, a survey over one of the most brilliant Keats biographies ever written: Walter Jackson Bate (1963), whom we have thus called the "archetypal biographer," manages to create one of the most vivid portraits of John Keats, whereby he raises the English poet to a new status (never before emphasized with such rigour and forcefulness), namely of one having revolutionized world literature by the writing of Hyperion (and the later writings). Thus, we explore Keats's life and works along the lines opened mainly by Bate (but also by other critics such as Jennifer Wunder or Nicholas Roe), all the time making reference (where possible more or less in extenso) to the most crucial letters, as evidentiary support by which to prove that the poet of high creativity had during his most productive period, and later, a genuine life-in-death experience, therefore a "Janusian" experience, in which life and death concomitantly co-existed in various forms: 1) at a mental level - his love relationship with Fanny Brawne was as painful as it was romantic on Keats's side (it triggered a deathly depression in him); 2) at a physical level - the last two months of his life are medically an enigma: they were spent by him in a condition in which he practically had no lungs whatsoever. In this connection, we emphasize the importance of Mircea Lãzãrescus notion of "intermediate beings" the fictional heroes populating the mind and thereby moulding individual destiny under whose powers Keats lived as if simultaneously in "a thousand worlds" together, and at the same time Keats himself becoming such an "intermediate" being, a hero of the imagination, through portraits drawn in biographies such as Bate's, thus moulding the destinies of generation upon generation of lovers of genuine high creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life-in-Death, or Life-after-Death! Who are the unfortunate creatures to be forced to such ordeal? Every kind of undead from ghouls to vampires, from mummies to zombies. The reasons for their being as such are different. And, in the case of zombies, we are talking about voodoo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including life-in-death experiences, death and undead creatures.

This essay aims to reflect on the fun with an aesthetic of violence in cult movies and some of its effects in contemporary subjectivity. It is based on some concepts of psychoanalytical theory in combination with the critical perspective of Theodor Adorno. The text makes use of the concept of diversion (at the same time as fun, entertainment, distraction or its opposite: deviation) as a source of criticism of the cultural industry, in order to demonstrate how certain aesthetic of violence produces a passive sublimation and, in a certain way, alienates many subjects, mainly at the political point of view. They represent a sort of "undeads", or helplesslies zombies, as demonstrated by the analysis of Slavoj Zizek. The movie Funny Games by Michael Haneke ilustrates this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mary Shelley always showed a deep interest in the themes of reanimation and immortality, closely connected with her biographical experience and her political and social engagement. This paper aims at exploring this subject in her short stories, mainly focusing on "Valerius, the Reanimated Roman", "The Mortal Immortal", and "Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dans ce texte nous résumons quatre essais récents sur le phénomène actuel du zombie ainsi qu’un collectif sur l’œuvre de Richard Matheson dont la première version filmique du roman Je suis une légende a servi d’inspiration à l’ur-film de zombies, La nuit des morts vivants de George A. Romero. Tandis que Pierre Cassou-Noguès et Maxime Coulombe signent des traitements plus philosophiques du zombie, leurs ouvrages diffèrent beaucoup dans leur forme et leur fonction. Pour leur part, Amélie Pépin et Vincent Paris offrent des études plus limitées du zombie en tant que phénomène filmique et sociologique.

Zombien är mer populär än någonsin och fyller både biosalonger, teatrar och dagstidningens kultursidor medan filmer om varelsen för ungefär tjugo år sedan ofta totalförbjöds eller censurerades till oigenkännlighet. De populärkulturella zombier vi möter i den moderna filmen är vandrande mänskliga kroppar i ständigt sönderfall. Döda men av någon orsak ändå levande. Utan några medvetna hjärnfunktioner drivs de av en omåttlig hunger i jakt på människor att äta. Som en blasfemisk parafras på den sista måltiden festar de döda på blodet och köttet. I den här artikeln avser jag undersöka några aspekter av den moderna zombiens budskap för att se vilken roll de fyller i det populärkulturella utbudet.

The article analyzes literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman's views about the undead characters present in the poems of William Wordsworth. Topics discussed include Hartman's description of Wordsworth's style of focusing on the ethical meaning of life, Hartman's style of literary criticism embodied by political engagement through a negation of indifference to the world and Hartman's endorsing of a literary critic as someone who explores thoughts in a relational and loving way.