Evolution of the vampire from mythologies of the ancient world to the twentieth century gothic fiction

The aim of this thesis is to examine the transformation that the vampire image goes through from folktales of the ancient world to the twentieth century Gothic fiction. The vampire, one of the most popular embodiments of the evil, evolves in different contexts that are dominated by different worldviews of people.In the folktales and mythologies that circulated around the world, `the evil? was attributed to non-human, supernatural beings by ancient people whose limits to understand the ways of nature were immense. So the vampire, as an entirely supernatural creature, provided a persona for people through whom they could explain things they normally can?t, such as the essence of life and death, the source of evil, the life after death.During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the vampire was present in the Gothic narratives of many writers. Coleridge, Keats and Le Fanu resurrected the ancient vampire Lamia/Lilith and presented vampirism and evil as the outcomes of their heroines? non-human nature. Lord Byron was the first writer to depict the male vampire in English literature. he portrayed his vampire as a Romantic hero who has acquired vampirism as a curse that he inherited as a result of his confrontation with `the Other?. Later Polidori took up `the Byronic Vampire? and created his own `aristocratic? blood sucker Lord Ruthven in his short novel The Vampyre , which prepared a transition ground for Stoker?s Count Dracula, the most complex vampire figure; the perfect `Other?; the source of all kinds of anxieties of the Victorian people.In the twentieth century, Anne Rice depicted existentialist, human vampires who invited the reader out for a journey to seek the source of good and evil; the `ultimate? meaning of life and death. At the end of this journey, they found out that there are no divine authorities to tell them the secrets of their existence; the source of evil is not the `supernatural?, not `the other? but the human nature itself.Key Words: Vampire, Myth, Supernatural, Fear, Evil, Anxiety, the Other, Existentialist