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Delights Of The Night And Pleasures Of The Void: Vampirism And Entropy In Nineteenth-Century Literature., Michael James Dennison

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation explores the figure of the vampire in the nineteenth century as a metaphor of disorder, especially as interpreted through the root metaphor of the second law of thermodynamics, also known as entropy. The theoretical approach used in the reading of several vampire texts is an entropy theory of literature, a mostly aesthetic approach of relevance to a comparatist study on vampirism and entropy. Chapter One considers the female vampire in one of her earliest nineteenth-century incarnations, the seductive Clarimonde of Theophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse. Chapter Two is a study of the vampire women in Edgar Allan Poe's …