Prominent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the "new vampire" as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in "vampire identity" impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.

Michael Haus is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Political Science at Darmstadt University of Technology. His current research focuses on the institutional design of local government in a comparative perspective. Recent publications include: *Bürgergesellschaft, soziales Kapital und lokale Politik, Leske & Budrich: Opladen 2002 (editor).
Hubert Heinelt is Professor of Public Administration/Public Policy and Urban Studies at the Institute for Political Science at Darmstadt University of Technology. His current research focuses on local policy and politics and European integration and EU cohesion policy, as well as on issues of participatory governance. He is co-chair of the study group "Lokale Politikforschung" of the German Political Science Association (DVPW), a member of the executive board of the European Urban Research Association (EURA), as well as co- of the series Gesellschaftspolitik und Staatstätigkeit of Leske & Budrich, Opladen. His recent publications include:
*Brennpunkt Stadt. Stadtpolitik und lokale Politikforschung in den 80er und 90er Jahren (Stadtforschung aktuell 31), Birkhäuser: Basel/Boston/Berlin 1991 (editor, together with Hellmut Wollmann)
*Politik in europäischen Städten. Fallstudien zur Bedeutung lokaler Politik (Stadtforschung aktuell 38), Birkhäuser: Basel/Boston/Berlin 1993 (editor, together with Margit Mayer)
*Policy Networks and European Structural Funds. A Comparison between Member States, Avebury: London 1996 (together with Randall Smith)
*Zivile Gesellschaft. Entwicklung, Defizite und Potentiale, Leske & Budrich: Opladen 1997 (together with Klaus M. Schmals)
Murray Stewart is Reader at the University of the West of England, Bristol and was Director of the Cities research centre at the University of the West of England, Bristol 1997-2002. His current research activities include participation in the national evaluations of the New Deal for Communities and of Local Strategic Partnerships. He was a member of the Social Exclusion Unit PAT 17 Policy Action Team, (Joining It Up Locally), and is the academic member of the Regional Co-ordination Unit Advisory Group. He is Deputy Chairman (and South West Trustee) of the Lloyds/TSB Foundation for England and Wales. Recent publications include:
*Cross-cutting Issues affecting Local Government, London: Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1999
*Community Leadership in Area Regeneration, JRF Report, Bristol: The Policy Press 2000
*Understanding Collaboration : International perspectives on Theory, Method and Practice. Proceedings of an International Conference, Bristol 2000 (with D. Purdue)
*Globalism and Local Democracy (ed. with R. Hambleton and H. Savitch.)