Reflected Shadows: Folklore and the Gothic ABSTRACTS Dr Gail-Nina Anderson (Independent Scholar)
[email protected] Dracula’s Cape: Visual Synecdoche and the Culture of Costume. In 1939 Robert Bloch wrote a story called ‘The Cloak’ which took to its extreme a fashion statement already well established in popular culture – vampires wear cloaks. This illustrated paper explores the development of this motif, which, far from having roots in the original vampire lore of Eastern Europe, demonstrates a complex combination of assumptions about vampires that has been created and fed by the fictional representations in literature and film.While the motif relates most immediately to perceptions of class, demonic identity and the supernatural, it also functions within the pattern of nostalgic reference that defines the vampire in modern folklore and popular culture. The cloak belongs to that Gothic hot-spot, the 1890s, but also to Bela Lugosi, to modern Goth culture and to that contemporary paradigm of ready-fit monsters, the Halloween costume shop, taking it, and its vampiric associations, from aristocratic attire to disposable disguise. Biography: Dr Gail-Nina Anderson is a freelance lecturer who runs daytime courses aimed at enquiring adult audiences and delivers a programme of public talks for Newcastle’s Literary and Philosophical Library. She is also a regular speaker at the Folklore Society ‘Legends’ weekends, and in 2013 delivered the annual Katharine Briggs Lecture at the Warburg Institute, on the topic of Fine Art and Folklore. She specialises in the myth-making elements of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the development of Gothic motifs in popular culture.