The popularity of vampire novels has come and gone over the years. And the romantic novels seem more popular than ever before. The male vampire have taken the stereotyperole as a sexual object. But what is it that makes the male characters desirable?The vampire genre was developed from defining female Vampires as sexual freeand liberal but with a punishment awaiting them.

AbstractMaster?s Thesis in Comparative literatureTitle: Ghettoiserade Vampyrer. En studie av barnvampyrlitteratur och dess betydelse för vampyrlitteraturgenren (Ghettoized Vampires. A study of children?s vampire literature and its significance for the vampire literature genre)Writer: Peter KostenniemiDepartment of Literature, History of Ideas and ReligionSupervisor: Anna NordenstamExaminer: Yvonne LefflerKey Words: Vampire literature, children?s literature, Der kleine Vampir, Nattens BørnIn vampire literature research the focus usually lies on adult and, to some extent, young adult fiction.

Abstract ?The Vampire from past to present?. This essay studies and compares the early historical Vampire as it is presented in some of the Western Europe countries, primarily Greece, but also Romania and how their descriptions of the Vampire have inspired the portrait of Vampires in modern films and literature. The essay aims to answer the questions:How has the historical, traditional, European Vampire developed through the centuries into the modern Vampire of today? Which original facts and perceptions about the Vampire from a Christian and pre-Christian point of view can be observed in the modern Vampire, as it is presented in the chosen films and furthermore, can any new ideas be observed in the films?By studying Vampire literature and poems throughout the centuries, a very interesting picture appears.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how the supernatural and the occult are portrayed inpopular culture. To be able to do this, I have chosen to perform a discourse analysis of the twofirst novels in the L. J Smith series The Vampire Diaries. The novels are called TheAwakening and The Struggle.I apply the following questions in my analysis to narrow down the perspective further.?In what situations are supernatural used in the books and what part does it play??How does the supernatural affect the main characters and how is this portrayed in the novel??How is the supernatural portrayed depending on the gender of the character?I will focus mostly on the Vampires since they generally are the ones who introduce thesupernatural elements into the story.I am applying gender theory in my discourse analyses of the novels, to hopefully be able togive a wider picture of the supernatural in relation to gender in the novels.I begin with analyzing the main discourses in the story, revolving around the supernatural.Secondly I analyze what impact the supernatural has on the main character.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate if there might be a possiblecorrelation between young women´s fascination with the vampire narrative andtheir search for identity in the late modern age. With the help of contemporarysociological studies in the field of the late modern man and today?s youth culture,I?ve chosen to do qualitative interviews with eight young women in order to examinehow today?s society affects their process of identification. Lately we?ve been ableto see an enormous interest for books that deal with the vampire saga, and while thereaders are mostly young females, it brought me to ask the question why the combinationof teenage drama and Vampires seems to be such a winning concept.We live in a time where most young females experience a lot of pressure trying to addup to the demands of society, and as the media keep producing images of youngwomen being thin and looking like supermodels, most teenagers feel a lot of pressureand anxiety trying to live up to such unnatural ideals that in the long run might lead tovarious health issues and eating disorders.As a result of this thesis I?ve found that the vampire narrative answers to some ofthe existential needs we have as members of a late modern society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how contemporary attitudes towards death andsexuality is made visible and connected in the vampire novels Interview with the Vampire andDead Until Dark. The aim is to investigate why the vampire novel has reached today?samount of popularity and if it can be explained by theories of death and sexuality in modernsociety and in popular culture.The most important theories in this examination are Zygmunt Bauman?s theories aboutmodern society, Jean Baudrillard?s thoughts about death in the postmodernity and MichelFoucault?s studies regarding sexuality in the Western societies. The conclusion presented isthat sexuality and death are well connected in the examined novels and in popular culture as awhole and death?s popularity in popular culture could be a result of repressed emotionsregarding death and sorrow, which can be helped by us working on handle death more visiblyand with higher regard..

This paper examines in what way the heterosexual matrix is challenged by Stephenie Meyer in Breaking dawn (Så länge vi båda andas). By doing a thematic study on the various family constellations appearing in the novel, I search for the queer elements in it. I discuss incest, family building and motherhood, and find that there are numerous queer elements associated with the themes I have chosen. I conclude that the Cullen family challenges the heterosexual matrix, despite not being typical queer vampire characters. I also find that building a successful family is not based on gender or constellation otherwise, but is instead dependant on democracy and equality.

The first vampire film I ever saw was Interview with a vampire. ?I haven?t been human for two hundred years?, opened up not only the film, but a whole new world I knew nothing about. The world, as it were, opened its doors to me again after I had seen the film adaption of Stephenie Meyers Twilight. I decided to write down a few thoughts, capture my frame of mind, and these paragraphs then turned into a text: ?I tankarnas skal?.              When I did research for this essay I discovered that my text held certain similarities with the modern vampire novel.

Detta är en studie om det går att använda vampyrer som inspirationskälla i undervisningen på högstadiet. Syftet är att besvara följande frågeställningar:Hur kan vampyrtemat motiveras och användas i klassrummet med skräcklitteratur som Dracula (1897) och Om jag kunde drömma (2005), som är första delen i Twilight serien, som utgångspunkt?Vilka modeller inom litteraturundervisning finns att tillämpa för vampyrtemat?För att besvara frågeställningarna har närläsning använts som metod. Resultatet visar att vampyren med all rätt kan användas som inspirationskälla i undervisningssyfte. Studien visar att man måste introducera skräcklitteratur med försiktighet och användandet av olika modeller är viktigt för att nå fram till samtliga elever.

This paper investigates narrative and thematic structures in Damien Echols? autobiography Life After Death (2012) and Stephen King?s horror novel ?Salem?s Lot (1975). In Life After Death Echols tells the tale of his eighteen-year incarceration on Death Row in Arkansas/USA. He also uses his childhood memories to overcome hardships in the prison system. ?Salem?s Lot by Stephen King deals with the invasion of Vampires in a small town in rural Maine in the North East corner of the United States.  The author of this study discusses if and how Damien Echols was inspired in his writing by the writings of Stephen King.

This master's thesis in Library and Information Science examines how the genre division of the horror fictionis constructed at the children and youth department of a library by studying subject headings of the titles.The aim is to examine what is included in the genre, in the two labelings called vampire and nail-biter/spine-chiller, what separates them, and what difference there is between children and youth thrillers/horror fiction. Also the cover designs and how readers portray these books are studied. The study is made in order to develop the knowledge of the genre to help librarians and borrowers. The great popularity of the genre among borrowers and people in general, and the importance of having knowledge of things that borrowers are interested in, are the motivation of performing the study. The method is a case study and conducted with and based on genre theory which shows how a genre is defined, how it can be divided and what conventions there are for the horror fiction in particular.