Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Words That Summoned Vampires,” on the literary origins of Dracula and other fanged fiends, with Curt Herr, professor of Victorian, Gothic, and Queer literature at Kutztown University and former editor of The Journal of Dracula Studies.
Before Nosferatu there was Dracula, and before Dracula there was Varney.
Yes, Varney. And who the heck was Varney, you might ask?
Come to Philadelphia’s Black Squirrel Club to excavate the forgotten vampires that gave rise to familiar ones with Curt Herr, who has taught courses on vampire literature at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and focuses his Gothic literature classes at Kutztown University on vampire themes.
We’ll go back in time to Varney’s 1845 rise in the literary phenomenon that was Victorian Street Fiction and published stories known as “Penny Dreadfuls.” The first 'disposable' forms of literature written for the newly literate working class, such stories were published in newspapers, cost pennies to purchase, and were meant to be read quickly and tossed away. Their authors were hack writers focused on crime, monsters, insanity, and murder, and the tales they produced featured buckets of blood.
Within this genre, Varney the Vampire (or The Feast of Blood) began serialization in British newspapers in 1845. Wildly popular, it ran for a whopping three years and compiled into the first vampire novel in the history of English literature. Its lead character, Sir Francis Varney, influenced everyone from Bram Stoker—who heavily borrowed some of Varney’s exploits for his own novel, Dracula—to the writers of TV’s vampire soap opera, Dark Shadows.
Dr. Herr will discuss how Sir Francis Varney could be called Dracula's vampiric grandfather in theme, influence, and style. He’ll also explore the erotic nature of the vampire's bite and trace its changing tone from animalistic feeding to erotically charged seductions.
You’ll learn how Stoker's novel was transgressive on many levels, exploring the rise of the “New Woman” and feminism while conversely creating monstrous mothers who consume their young. It explored the homoerotic nature of the vampire, which Anne Rice capitalized in her Vampire Chronicles and which was later explored in True Blood.
You’ll emerge from the talk perhaps knowing enough about vampires’ lineage to keep one listening until the sun comes up. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)
Image: From the cover of one of the original 1845 versions of Varney the Vampire. (Tint added.)
