Vampire Lore: From Writings of Jan Louis Perkowski

by Jan Louis Perkowski

This omnibus volume collects under a single cover the entire oeuvre of writings by Jan Louis Perkowski on the vampire theme in mythology and folklore, including his three previously published monographs (Vampires, Dwarves, and Witches Among the Ontario Kashubs, 1972; Vampires of the Slavs, 1976; and The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism, 1989), in addition to 18 previously uncollected articles on the subject, one newly written for this volume.

"Some of the materials here are enormously useful because they reveal historical stages in the conception of the vampire that are quite different from what most would know about the vampire who are familiar only with the Western literary tradition. This corrective aspect of Perkowski's Vampires, which exposes a tradition directly linked to Balkan or at any rate Slavic folklore that follows a path that is quite independent of the 19th-century literary/metaphoric notions of the vampire, has had a difficult time getting traction in popular consciousness in the West, which suggests an entrenchment of the Romantic and Gothic traditions, and a concomitant resistance to correction by legitimate ethnographic research."

Softbound Slavica Publishing (January, 2006)