This book has been written in an attempt to fill gaps in scholarship, bridge academic disciplines, and present a coherent, historically informed theory of the vampire. For the most part, studies on vampirism focus on a single period, a single tradition, or productions in a single medium. There are many excellent studies examining Victorian vampires, the undead in cinema, contemporary vampire fictions, and the vampire in folklore. However, the purpose here is different. By means of site-specific, comparative analysis, the work at hand seeks to account for the logic underlying the vampire's many and conflicting forms. Besides source material in English, Metamorphoses of the Vampire makes extensive use of primary and secondary literature in French and German, which English language critics tend to ignore. Much of what is discussed in the pages to follow has far-ranging implications for the study of vampires in general, yet it has never been presented to students and scholars in Australia, England, and North America. Above all, Metamorphoses of the Vampire proposes to explain why representations of vampirism begin in the eighteenth century, flourish in the nineteenth, and eclipse most other forms of monstrosity in the twentieth. Although the book's aims are synthetic and theoretical, the discussion is historically grounded in the analysis of particular works.

This study tries to be objective and neutral — to explore the categories established by the works themselves and, having determined their internal dynamics, to relate them to other texts and historical points of reference.