Nina Auerbach shows how every age embraces the vampire it needs, and gets the vampire it deserves. Working with a wide range of texts, as well as movies and television, Auerbach locates vampires at the heart of our national experience and uses them as a lens for viewing the last two hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history. "[Auerbach] has seen more Hammer movies than I (or the monsters) have had steaming hot diners, encountered more bloodsuckers than you could shake a stick at, even a pair of crossed sticks, such as might deter a very sophisticated ogre, a hick from the Moldavian boonies....Auerbach has dissected and deconstructed them with the tender ruthlessness of a hungry chef, with cogency and wit."—Eric Korn, Times Literary Supplement "This seductive work offers profound insights into many of the urgent concerns of our time and forces us to confront the serious meanings that we invest, and seek, in even the shadiest manifestations of the eroticism of death."—Wendy Doniger, The Nation "A vigorous, witty look at the undead as cultural icons."— Kirkus Review "In case anyone should think this book is merely a boring lit-crit exposition...Auerbach sets matters straight in her very first paragraph. 'What vampires are in any given generation,' she writes, 'is a part of what I am and what my times have become. This book is a history of Anglo-American culture through its mutating vampires.'...Her book really takes off."—Maureen Duffy, New York Times Book Review "My central idea: that vampirism springs not only from paranoia, xenophobia, or immortal longings, but from generosity and shared enthusiasm. This strange taste cannot be separated from the expansive impulses that make us human." Our Vampires, Ourselves is not your ordinary work of literary criticism, but rather an entertaining, thought-provoking tour of the history of vampires in Western civilization. The vampires and works discussed include Lord Ruthven, Varney, Carmilla, Dracula, Fritz Leiber's "The Girl," famous film Draculas, Fred Saberhagen's Dracula, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Saint-Germain, Anne Rice's Louis and Lestat, Stephen King's Barlow, films such as The Lost Boys and Near Dark, and countless books. As the New York Times writes, "Ms. Auerbach presents her arguments with wit and clarity ... Ms. Auerbach implicitly rejects the Freudian and Jungian interpretations of these figures as either psychosexual metaphors or archetypes, preferring to see them in sociopolitical terms. But such interpretations need not be mutually exclusive. There is, after all, more in vampire metaphors than meets any one mind's eye." Ms. Auerbach presents her arguments with wit and clarity, but it is when she hits 20th-century America that her book really takes off.... On the trail of her mutating vampires, Ms. Auerbach suggests that the unexpected popularity, among both the British working class and American students, of the horror films produced by England's Hammer Studios in the 1960s represented a postwar rebellion against the reimposition of patriarchal authority. Yet by the '70s, when the American feminist movement was revitalized, the image of the vampire had changed: now the vampire was the sensitized new man constructed by "wishful feminists." -- The New York Times Book Review, Maureen Duffy Sometimes bewitchingly erotic, sometimes repellent, sometimes ravenous, vampires embody their societies' fears and forbidden dreams. In this wry, original book, literary critic and vampire enthusiast Nina Auerbach shows how every age embraces the vampire it needs and, at the same time, gets the vampire it deserves. Nina Auerbach (1943-2017) was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Though her area of academic concentration was in Victorian literature, she also ranged through cultural history, horror fiction, and film.