"Present in breakfast foods, comics, television series, computer games, feature films, and books from academic studies to best-selling novels, the vampire hovers over society like Yeats's "rough beast, its hour come round at last." While many readers may be familiar with leading figures like Dracula and Lestat, few are aware of the range and variety of the vampire legacy that stretches from the early nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth - and beyond. The essays in this volume use a humanistic viewpoint to explore the evolution and significance of the vampire in literature from the Romantic era to the millennium."--Jacket.