Vampire Contagion: First Military Reports about Serbian Vampires and Their Literary Representations in Contemporary Serbian Fiction

Abstract

This paper analyses three works of fiction (two novels and one short story) inspired by the first Austrian military reports on vampires. These reports suggest how the discourse about the Other (primitive, barbaric, half-cultivated, etc.), personified in the Serbs, evolved in the Age of Enlightenment. Additionally, the reports have been a source of creative inspiration for a number of literary (re)interpretations of the vampire phenomenon: from postmodern literary entities (mediating an open dialog of the novel, written by M. Novaković, with the entire tradition of the Serbian horror fantasy), through existential studies of the meaning of humanity in the context of the “demonic gift” (the novel by M. Milosavljević), and biological metaphors of disease, to the latest representation of this demonic character as a dark subculture hero existing in the liminal areas of “civilized” space (G. Skrobonja).