Holy terror: The vampire as numinous experience in British and American literature.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the experience of the numinous in a specific category of Gothic literature, which employs a vampire as the primary focus of its action, regardless of whether that figure is literal or metaphoric. The texts examined in the following chapters include both poetry and fiction by both British and American authors. This study explores how the use of the vampire in literature has served to convey a human sense of alienation from the divine and a desire to overcome that alienation. While expressing the physical, isolated state of the individual human being, as a numinous figure, the vampire also represents the transcendent agent through which individuals and societies may confront questions about their innate goodness or evilness and the condition of their belief in the divine and in the possibility of an afterlife. This dissertation defines the idea of the numinous as it was developed by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy and expands upon that concept with the use of several later examinations of the experience of the numinous. This study argues that a textual experience of the numinous in the form of the vampire propels the subject of the experience on a spiritual journey involving both psychological and religious qualities, and that through that journey the reader, and possibly the main character, begins to understand the value of his or her existence in the world and to negotiate a new relationship with the divine.