Collins, Robert A.

Mystery. Immortality. Power. These are the qualities of
the fictional vampire that make the beast appealing to
mortal readers. The reigning queen of contemporary vampire
literature is Anne Rice whose novel Interview With the
Vampire , the first in a series, was published in 1976.
Since then, Rice has produced two additional offerings in
the Vampire Chronicles. Each novel deals with the delicate
balance between the world of mortals and the existence of
the vampires. Rice has created a new generation of vampires
who reflect the alienation, isolation, and self-doubt
experienced by modern humans. Rice uses her immortals to
voice her opinions regarding church, society, and modern
philosophy. She changed the rules for the undead, made the
vampires into metaphors for the human condition, and
accomplished a little psychotherapy at the same time .

Certain elements in P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins (1934) and Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935) depict concerns that feminist critics deem important, such as mother figures, females as artists, women who exert power or lack it, female self-concepts, matrilineal connections and mother/child relationships. Travers sometimes treats these subjects ambiguously or ambivalently, but her attention to them indicates a riveting interest at the time. Her creative process whereby she projected childhood fantasies onto her ideal nanny, Mary Poppins, with whom she identified herself and others, relates to a feminine psychology. Travers's cyclic and web-like plots may link her to feminist aesthetics as currently being explored.

Evangeline Walton's fictionalization of the Four Branches of the Mabinogion projects an alternative focus onto the collection of Welsh myths. Previous treatments and translations from Welsh to English perpetuate the traditional interpretation of the Mabinogion as the fragmented story of the Hero-God's life from conception to death. Walton's work changes this focus and subtly changes the structural order of the tales. Walton offers a narrative from the perspective of the female world view, as opposed to the male perspective which has survived with the tales from the time of their discovery in the Middle Ages. In a comparison of Walton's tetralogy to the translations of Guest, Jones, Gantz, and Ford, it becomes clear that Walton's use of symbols and structure, and her alternative focus change the Hero tale, or Boy-Mare tale, into an epic structured upon the decline of the Goddess in Celtic culture. The application of Mythological and Psychofeminist critical theories to the recurring themes, symbols, and archetypes in Walton's Mabinogion will demonstrate the existence of this nontraditional perspective.

Maya Angelou uses an autobiographical form in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to portray her childhood. The lessons she acquires as a child are depicted in positive scenes between her and her grandmother and other female figures in her life. Likewise, Maxine Hong Kingston portrays, in an arguably autobiographical form, her life lessons in Woman Warrior. She aligns herself matrilineally with her female ancestors and heritage. Struggles between her American self and the Chinese heritage her mother speaks of become her means for finding self-definition. In contrast, Sheri S. Tepper's fantasy novel A Plague of Angels, portrays a female utopian society against a backdrop of male dominated ruin. She aligns the female protagonist with nature and ecological concerns. The turn away from society that is patriarchal and destructive is made toward a society defined in ecofeminist terms of Earth Mothers, animal rights, and the health of the environment.

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange offers a "disciplinary technology," the "Ludovico Technique," which resembles Michel Foucault's interpretation of Jeremy Bentham's architectural figure, the Panopticon. Burgess's novel functions analogously to Foucault's image of the panopticon by dehumanizing and controlling the criminal, Alex, by omniscient, omnipotent surveillance, and also by disciplining the reader to assimilate an ambiguous vernacular language: the reader is "trained" by panopticonic techniques to read and interpret the novel.

Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound is both a tribute to and exegesis of Mary Shelley's novel. The central figure, Joseph Bodenland, the 'everyman' of modern technological society, emerges as a composite of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature; he is the pivotal character through whom Aldiss revises and reinterprets Shelley's themes. Bodenland's role as a double reveals how Aldiss has updated Shelley's biographically inspired atheism and psychological orphanhood. As an atheist, Bodenland symbolizes technology and modern society's increasing separation from faith and God. Bodenland's sense of orphanhood suggests humanity's separation from the natural world, and by extension, the loss of individual identity in a technological, scientific world. Bodenland's status as the last man on Earth symbolizes Aldiss's concern that modern society has not been responsible for its actions.

Although critics have observed Philip K. Dick's references to empathy throughout his novels, short stories, and essays, no analysis has attempted to examine the role of empathy in his writings. In contrast to the element of ratiocination (or logical extrapolation) widely considered to be the hallmark of science fiction, Dick's fictions are held together by the value they primarily place not on reason, but on an empathic understanding of our actions and their effects upon the lives of other entities. Using two early short stories ("Beyond Lies the Wub" and "Roog"), two non-Earth ecologies (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Dr. Bloodmoney). I will demonstrate that Dick's works are united by an ethical imperative to understand the thoughts and emotions of others, human and nonhuman alike.

Sheri S. Tepper, using postmodern literary techniques, utilizes ancient story forms to examine our contemporary world in three science fiction novels. Classical Greek mythology in the form of a parodic drama, "Iphigenia at Ilium" is intricately woven into The Gate to Women's Country. European fairy tale characters become metaphors for a postmodern world threatened by overpopulation and the loss of magic in Beauty. An American Indian fable, featuring Coyote, provides the mythic paradigm for A Plague of Angels. Each ancient story form is re-worked into Tepper's postmodernist fiction giving a new slant to familiar stories that highlight Tepper's feminist, ecological themes: of the folly of war, the threat of overpopulation, and mankind's interconnectedness to all living creatures.

Marlowe's adaptation of chronicle history for the composition of Edward II entails a multi-leveled process in which the playwright reduces the political and patriotic strife of his source material into a fierce contention of personal will driven by greed, pride, and lust for personal gratification. In opposition to the providential control apparent in Elizabethan accounts of English history, and influenced by the social machinations of the English and Scottish courts in the 1590's, Marlowe boldly alters the chronology of historical events to achieve a reactionary effect that is not evident in his main source, Holinshed's Chronicles; the ages and backgrounds of many characters are also altered to create almost archetypal antagonists in order to illuminate the human forces at work in the play. Moreover, Marlowe manipulates the staging of military action, personal discord, and Edward II's murder itself to accentuate his reductionist treatment of source material.

In Sidney's conception of mimesis, a pyramid of autonomy exists with God as the ultimate artificer, and the succeeding levels peopled with human artificers, then fictional artificers. The autonomous character of each descending artificer connects one to the power of the heavenly maker. Sidney's use of mimesis argues for cognizance of our innate capacities, for which we are grateful solely to God. In creating the characters of The Old Arcadia, Sidney first endows them with the capacity for "fore-conceit," a necessary corollary to Free will, the essential aspect of man's condition as Sidney conceived it. By emphasizing the artificer/artifact relationship on successive levels, Sidney implies the focal importance of the creative process. Because Sidney's artifacts are constructed in the image of their maker, despite the limitations of an "infected will," they are also artificers themselves, at least insofar as they approach a true mimesis of the nature of man.