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建立人际资源圈Analysis of Vampire Culture with The Twilight Saga
2015-06-21 来源: 51due教员组 类别: Essay范文
本文试图进一步研究吸血鬼文化的背景和分析吸血鬼文化与《暮光之城》系列。通过分析这部电影,我们可以看到现代吸血鬼电影的巨大变化与爱的主题,而不是暴力,和一些社会问题,如种族歧视,在电影中。吸血鬼文化是非常有趣和令人兴奋,充满传说和故事元素,可以帮助实现更好的西方文化在很大程度上。
Speaking of vampire, many people must think of the image of pale color, freezing hands and feet, huge powers and splitting movements. Especially the successful release of the film The Twilight Saga in 2008, vampire gets large popularity and gives rise to great attention and debates. Compared with the traditional vampire films, which generally show an evil monster with bloodthirsty by nature thus arousing infringement, hurt and disasters to people, The Twilight Saga presents a romantic story and sweet love, conveys the themes of social awareness, reality and fate, and vampire’s cultural connotations, which gives me most impression and interest and wins numerous people’s, especially the youngsters’, love. Therefore, this paper tries to take the charming and fascinated film as an example to analyze the vampire’s culture by exploring the background of vampire in literature and analyzing the vampire culture in The Twilight Saga with the comparison of the film’s vampire image with traditional vampire image and the exploration of racial discrimination represented in this film.
It is very common that vampire has a long history in the western culture, as almost all the cultures in the world have superstitions, including tales of monsters, myths and vampire. Also, vampire is very popular in the western world, although it originated in Europe and was described as an image of terrible evil and supernatural power (Lackoff). Historically, vampire has experienced three stages of medieval supervision and legend, literary works in industrial revolution and modern multi-culture, and thus formed a solid image towards people from evil bloodsucker to incarnation human.
In the ancient times, almost all the cultures have the tales of vampire, such as ancient Egyptian culture had vampire of zombies, ancient Arabian had vampires of witches or wizards, ancient Greek and Roman had vampire of half human, ancient China had resin ghost, etc. But all of them had a common feature of longing for blood, that was, they had to suck blood from a living animal. Actually, ancient people were difficult to realize and understand the reasons of blooding, diseases, and especially, death, so they invented various kinds of blood-thirsty creatures in their spiritual world, which indicated the ancient people’s fear and ignorance for nature (Ledge). For example, black death, a classical and serious disease in history, had killed up to one third of European population in the 14th century. At that time, numberless corpses could be seen here and there, and all the people went into panic totally, which led to a condition that people buried the patients before their death, while the buried patients struggled to live and strived out of the coffin, and they sucked blood, which was invalid in the end. Then when people opened the tomb to bury other corpses, they would see the body had a little bloodstain, which was considered as a vampire. They thought a ghost went up from the grave, wandered in the street in the midnight and lived on blood.
Meanwhile, when in medieval era, the religion had a great influence on the development of vampire. Human beings had created many legends and tales about combination devil and blood (Lakeoff). As is known to us, there must be many related records in many countries and nations. Vampires were derived from the European culture whose legends and superstitions could be found in the ancient Greek culture and Christian tradition (Lakeoff). Besides, the first appearance of vampire in literature was in the poetry, taking Corinth’s Finance of Goethe as a classic example (Senf). The poetry, based on Folklore of Trahler, mainly talked about a young Athenian Corinth visiting his father’s old friend, and his daughter fell in love with Corinth, but unluckily, she died early.
It was said that the vampires’ legends and tales of medieval Europe represented two believes in Christian world. As for the first belief, it was the Christian belief that there was still life even after death. It held the idea that human being had soul. The body was in the form of material, while the soul could still exist in another world after death. The second belief sounded a little bit supernatural. It told that blood, in the Christian world, was not only the symbol of vitality but also was full of supernatural abilities. In the New Testament, it was written that before the crucifixion Jesus and his followers in the last supper ate bread and wine representing as their flesh and blood, which tells that the blood had condonable value. Thus, the evil souls, who fought against God, lived by sucking the blood of the living animals. At that time, they were vampires considered to be selfish, cruel and bloodthirsty.
With time going over and the development of the society plus science, the industrial revolution changed people’s life a lot and the development of vampire went into a new page as well at the beginning of 17th century. In this period, the rationalism went into the platform of the era because of the enlightenment movement. And people became much more reasonable than before. Vampire thus had a new life with the development of civilization, and gained a little popularity in literature. At that time, vampire not only appeared in the poetry, but also attracted some novelists’ attention and eyes, Sheridan’s short story Camilla, for example (Riter). Sheridan created a new perspective of vampire legends, who combined some gothic elements with vampires’ stories together. The vampire in Camilla was the first one based on a real story. However, the image of vampire in this period still presented as evil and cruel, while traditional terrible vampires’ image was replaced by mysterious fascinating new image at this time (Riter).
Though the image of vampires in the 18th and 19th century was still very cruel, selfish, and blood-thirsty, it provided a basis for the deeper development of vampires in the 20th century. When in the 20th century, the development of vampires’ literature was concentrated on the United States and writers started create a new image of vampires instead of simply borrowing vampires’ legends and tales: vampires’ image became more humanized and diversified (Gaman). In this period, the science had a further development and people became more reasonable than before, while the religion had less influence on the vampires’ image. Then more common human vampires’ image appeared in literature, which was influenced by American democracy, and literature thus were not simply characterized as cruel or noble, for example, the appearance of vegetarian vampires (Senf). The topics of transaction of good and evil began to prevail in the theme of vampire literature. Now the contemporary literature about vampires turned the cruel and bloodthirsty vampires’ image into sympathetic vampires’ image, which was endowed with human emotions more. The change, also, shows the large change of American social life. At this time, vampire literature began revolve around the topics of social issues, death and fate, and importance of life.
In addition, not only does literature reflect vampire culture, but also the media of the films and television shows can be tools to represent the vampire culture. After adapting the literary works, the vampire can be produced and presented on the big screen as well, Dracula, for example. It was considered to be one of works with the highest artistic value among all the vampire movies. Take The Twilight Saga as another example. The movie got a huge success of the vampire films. It is a series including four films: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Dawn. It mainly talks about human beings’ love, colorful campus life and horrible suspense with mysterious life of vampire and werewolf. Bella, the heroine, was a special girl with independence and special think and studied in the Phoenix High School. She met Edward, the hero, at school, and they fell in love, which is the clue of the whole movie. Just as mentioned, the movie tells the love, social issues, including racial discrimination, life and death.
However, The Twilight Saga is definitely different from the traditional vampire movies before, as the vampire is one of the most common and popular theme in television and film works since the first appearance of American vampire movie The Vampires in 1913 (Greg). Traditionally, the vampires are considered to revive after they died and feed on blood. They had no heartbeat and pulse, no death, no body but could live and keep the same forever. They had their own thoughts and supernatural power, while they are afraid of sunshine, garlic, holy water and wood (Seltzer). Most importantly, they always long for blood that they are hardly to control themselves when they smell the blood.
Speaking of The Twilight Saga, there are many differences compared with the traditional vampire movies. First of all, the appearance can be seen directly. In The Twilight Saga, Edward, the hero vampire, is a young high school student and always dresses a tight T-shirt and jeans. Also, his family do not pursue the high class extremely and all are close to common people, who show audience that they live a happy life. Instead, traditional vampire movies, such as Dracula and Interview With The Vampire, all are middle-age and dressed in noble clothes to show their nobleness. Meanwhile, they always keep themselves at the top of social class and are seldom close to the common class, which thus looked gloom and chilly as well.
Furthermore, the themes of The Twilight Saga and traditional vampire movies can be distinguished largely as well. As the traditional vampires feed on blood naturally, violence and love were the major themes in the traditional vampire movies. Though bloodthirsty and violence is hard to be avoided, the situation become better, especially The Twilight Saga. From the movies, we can see that all vampire movies conveyed a human nature of love. As for the Dracula, he was cursed willingly so that he could live with his lover but fell into eternal loneliness, and this is the same as the love between Louis and Clausdia. However, in The Twilight Saga, audience can see a sweet and romantic love between the hero and heroine. When Edward meets Bella in the classroom, they are attracted by each other and then fall in love and get married with a happy life in the end, though Edward could not help but to hurt Bella sometimes because of his nature. In this film, violence is replaced by the love as the theme of the film.
There are still much more difference between The Twilight Saga and traditional vampire movies, such as the life attitude, social relations, etc. Traditionally, the vampire was living in the human world but different from the human race. Thus, they always stayed away from the bustling place, living alone and not contacting with any other person. Meanwhile, they had to hide their identity as possible as what they could do, for example, Dracula had to live alone in one castle, Louis and Lester also lived alone, staying away from outside world. Compared with that, the vampire family could live in human world rather than a castle, and no longer live in a dark room during the day. They can live like human beings and have a happy life, like taking jobs and participating in activities.
Apart from the theme of love conveyed in The Twilight Saga, which is quite different from traditional vampire movies, the movie also presents a social issue of racial discrimination to some extent as well (Pramond). In The Twilight Saga, audience can see that Bella’s choice is not simply because of love, but because of racial identity and color as well. The fighting between the vampires and werewolves in the name of love is one of the most fascinating points in this movie. The werewolves and vampires have the same ancestors and represent low-class Quileute family and high-class Karen family respectively, representing the Indians and the white respectively in reality, because the Karen family come from the white race, while Quileute family are from the Indians. Jacob, the werewolf, is insulted by Alice, saying he is only a beast like a dog, and Bella hates his smell as well. Also, Bella chooses to support Edward rather than Jacob although she confesses to Jacob. Actually, the fighting between Edward and Jacob indicates the racial discrimination apparently.
With a long history, vampire plays a large role in the western culture and acquires great popularity in the modern world. The paper tries to explore the background of vampire culture and analyze further vampire culture with The Twilight Saga. By analyzing the film, we can see the large changes of modern vampire movies with the major theme of love instead of violence, and some social issues, such as the racial discrimination, presented in the movie. The vampire culture is very interesting and exciting, and is full of elements of legend and tale, which can help to realize better the western culture to a large extent.
Reference
Greg, Lois. The Twilight Saga: The Official Guide. New York: Little Readers, 2011.
Lackoff, Rout. Reading the Vampire. London: UK, 1994.
Ledge, Rout. Language and Women’s Place. New York: Harper Row Publishers, 1975.
Gaman, M. Psycholingusitics. Beijing: Peking Univesity Press. 2002.
Pramond, Nayar. How to Domesticate a Vampire: Gender, Blood Relations and Sexuality in Twilight. Nebula, 20006.
Riter, Geoge. Postmodern Social Theory. Beijing: Peking University Press. 2004.
Senf, Carol. The Vampirre in 19th English Literature. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1998.
Speaking of vampire, many people must think of the image of pale color, freezing hands and feet, huge powers and splitting movements. Especially the successful release of the film The Twilight Saga in 2008, vampire gets large popularity and gives rise to great attention and debates. Compared with the traditional vampire films, which generally show an evil monster with bloodthirsty by nature thus arousing infringement, hurt and disasters to people, The Twilight Saga presents a romantic story and sweet love, conveys the themes of social awareness, reality and fate, and vampire’s cultural connotations, which gives me most impression and interest and wins numerous people’s, especially the youngsters’, love. Therefore, this paper tries to take the charming and fascinated film as an example to analyze the vampire’s culture by exploring the background of vampire in literature and analyzing the vampire culture in The Twilight Saga with the comparison of the film’s vampire image with traditional vampire image and the exploration of racial discrimination represented in this film.
It is very common that vampire has a long history in the western culture, as almost all the cultures in the world have superstitions, including tales of monsters, myths and vampire. Also, vampire is very popular in the western world, although it originated in Europe and was described as an image of terrible evil and supernatural power (Lackoff). Historically, vampire has experienced three stages of medieval supervision and legend, literary works in industrial revolution and modern multi-culture, and thus formed a solid image towards people from evil bloodsucker to incarnation human.
In the ancient times, almost all the cultures have the tales of vampire, such as ancient Egyptian culture had vampire of zombies, ancient Arabian had vampires of witches or wizards, ancient Greek and Roman had vampire of half human, ancient China had resin ghost, etc. But all of them had a common feature of longing for blood, that was, they had to suck blood from a living animal. Actually, ancient people were difficult to realize and understand the reasons of blooding, diseases, and especially, death, so they invented various kinds of blood-thirsty creatures in their spiritual world, which indicated the ancient people’s fear and ignorance for nature (Ledge). For example, black death, a classical and serious disease in history, had killed up to one third of European population in the 14th century. At that time, numberless corpses could be seen here and there, and all the people went into panic totally, which led to a condition that people buried the patients before their death, while the buried patients struggled to live and strived out of the coffin, and they sucked blood, which was invalid in the end. Then when people opened the tomb to bury other corpses, they would see the body had a little bloodstain, which was considered as a vampire. They thought a ghost went up from the grave, wandered in the street in the midnight and lived on blood.
Meanwhile, when in medieval era, the religion had a great influence on the development of vampire. Human beings had created many legends and tales about combination devil and blood (Lakeoff). As is known to us, there must be many related records in many countries and nations. Vampires were derived from the European culture whose legends and superstitions could be found in the ancient Greek culture and Christian tradition (Lakeoff). Besides, the first appearance of vampire in literature was in the poetry, taking Corinth’s Finance of Goethe as a classic example (Senf). The poetry, based on Folklore of Trahler, mainly talked about a young Athenian Corinth visiting his father’s old friend, and his daughter fell in love with Corinth, but unluckily, she died early.
It was said that the vampires’ legends and tales of medieval Europe represented two believes in Christian world. As for the first belief, it was the Christian belief that there was still life even after death. It held the idea that human being had soul. The body was in the form of material, while the soul could still exist in another world after death. The second belief sounded a little bit supernatural. It told that blood, in the Christian world, was not only the symbol of vitality but also was full of supernatural abilities. In the New Testament, it was written that before the crucifixion Jesus and his followers in the last supper ate bread and wine representing as their flesh and blood, which tells that the blood had condonable value. Thus, the evil souls, who fought against God, lived by sucking the blood of the living animals. At that time, they were vampires considered to be selfish, cruel and bloodthirsty.
With time going over and the development of the society plus science, the industrial revolution changed people’s life a lot and the development of vampire went into a new page as well at the beginning of 17th century. In this period, the rationalism went into the platform of the era because of the enlightenment movement. And people became much more reasonable than before. Vampire thus had a new life with the development of civilization, and gained a little popularity in literature. At that time, vampire not only appeared in the poetry, but also attracted some novelists’ attention and eyes, Sheridan’s short story Camilla, for example (Riter). Sheridan created a new perspective of vampire legends, who combined some gothic elements with vampires’ stories together. The vampire in Camilla was the first one based on a real story. However, the image of vampire in this period still presented as evil and cruel, while traditional terrible vampires’ image was replaced by mysterious fascinating new image at this time (Riter).
Though the image of vampires in the 18th and 19th century was still very cruel, selfish, and blood-thirsty, it provided a basis for the deeper development of vampires in the 20th century. When in the 20th century, the development of vampires’ literature was concentrated on the United States and writers started create a new image of vampires instead of simply borrowing vampires’ legends and tales: vampires’ image became more humanized and diversified (Gaman). In this period, the science had a further development and people became more reasonable than before, while the religion had less influence on the vampires’ image. Then more common human vampires’ image appeared in literature, which was influenced by American democracy, and literature thus were not simply characterized as cruel or noble, for example, the appearance of vegetarian vampires (Senf). The topics of transaction of good and evil began to prevail in the theme of vampire literature. Now the contemporary literature about vampires turned the cruel and bloodthirsty vampires’ image into sympathetic vampires’ image, which was endowed with human emotions more. The change, also, shows the large change of American social life. At this time, vampire literature began revolve around the topics of social issues, death and fate, and importance of life.
In addition, not only does literature reflect vampire culture, but also the media of the films and television shows can be tools to represent the vampire culture. After adapting the literary works, the vampire can be produced and presented on the big screen as well, Dracula, for example. It was considered to be one of works with the highest artistic value among all the vampire movies. Take The Twilight Saga as another example. The movie got a huge success of the vampire films. It is a series including four films: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Dawn. It mainly talks about human beings’ love, colorful campus life and horrible suspense with mysterious life of vampire and werewolf. Bella, the heroine, was a special girl with independence and special think and studied in the Phoenix High School. She met Edward, the hero, at school, and they fell in love, which is the clue of the whole movie. Just as mentioned, the movie tells the love, social issues, including racial discrimination, life and death.
However, The Twilight Saga is definitely different from the traditional vampire movies before, as the vampire is one of the most common and popular theme in television and film works since the first appearance of American vampire movie The Vampires in 1913 (Greg). Traditionally, the vampires are considered to revive after they died and feed on blood. They had no heartbeat and pulse, no death, no body but could live and keep the same forever. They had their own thoughts and supernatural power, while they are afraid of sunshine, garlic, holy water and wood (Seltzer). Most importantly, they always long for blood that they are hardly to control themselves when they smell the blood.
Speaking of The Twilight Saga, there are many differences compared with the traditional vampire movies. First of all, the appearance can be seen directly. In The Twilight Saga, Edward, the hero vampire, is a young high school student and always dresses a tight T-shirt and jeans. Also, his family do not pursue the high class extremely and all are close to common people, who show audience that they live a happy life. Instead, traditional vampire movies, such as Dracula and Interview With The Vampire, all are middle-age and dressed in noble clothes to show their nobleness. Meanwhile, they always keep themselves at the top of social class and are seldom close to the common class, which thus looked gloom and chilly as well.
Furthermore, the themes of The Twilight Saga and traditional vampire movies can be distinguished largely as well. As the traditional vampires feed on blood naturally, violence and love were the major themes in the traditional vampire movies. Though bloodthirsty and violence is hard to be avoided, the situation become better, especially The Twilight Saga. From the movies, we can see that all vampire movies conveyed a human nature of love. As for the Dracula, he was cursed willingly so that he could live with his lover but fell into eternal loneliness, and this is the same as the love between Louis and Clausdia. However, in The Twilight Saga, audience can see a sweet and romantic love between the hero and heroine. When Edward meets Bella in the classroom, they are attracted by each other and then fall in love and get married with a happy life in the end, though Edward could not help but to hurt Bella sometimes because of his nature. In this film, violence is replaced by the love as the theme of the film.
There are still much more difference between The Twilight Saga and traditional vampire movies, such as the life attitude, social relations, etc. Traditionally, the vampire was living in the human world but different from the human race. Thus, they always stayed away from the bustling place, living alone and not contacting with any other person. Meanwhile, they had to hide their identity as possible as what they could do, for example, Dracula had to live alone in one castle, Louis and Lester also lived alone, staying away from outside world. Compared with that, the vampire family could live in human world rather than a castle, and no longer live in a dark room during the day. They can live like human beings and have a happy life, like taking jobs and participating in activities.
Apart from the theme of love conveyed in The Twilight Saga, which is quite different from traditional vampire movies, the movie also presents a social issue of racial discrimination to some extent as well (Pramond). In The Twilight Saga, audience can see that Bella’s choice is not simply because of love, but because of racial identity and color as well. The fighting between the vampires and werewolves in the name of love is one of the most fascinating points in this movie. The werewolves and vampires have the same ancestors and represent low-class Quileute family and high-class Karen family respectively, representing the Indians and the white respectively in reality, because the Karen family come from the white race, while Quileute family are from the Indians. Jacob, the werewolf, is insulted by Alice, saying he is only a beast like a dog, and Bella hates his smell as well. Also, Bella chooses to support Edward rather than Jacob although she confesses to Jacob. Actually, the fighting between Edward and Jacob indicates the racial discrimination apparently.
With a long history, vampire plays a large role in the western culture and acquires great popularity in the modern world. The paper tries to explore the background of vampire culture and analyze further vampire culture with The Twilight Saga. By analyzing the film, we can see the large changes of modern vampire movies with the major theme of love instead of violence, and some social issues, such as the racial discrimination, presented in the movie. The vampire culture is very interesting and exciting, and is full of elements of legend and tale, which can help to realize better the western culture to a large extent.
Reference
Greg, Lois. The Twilight Saga: The Official Guide. New York: Little Readers, 2011.
Lackoff, Rout. Reading the Vampire. London: UK, 1994.
Ledge, Rout. Language and Women’s Place. New York: Harper Row Publishers, 1975.
Gaman, M. Psycholingusitics. Beijing: Peking Univesity Press. 2002.
Pramond, Nayar. How to Domesticate a Vampire: Gender, Blood Relations and Sexuality in Twilight. Nebula, 20006.
Riter, Geoge. Postmodern Social Theory. Beijing: Peking University Press. 2004.
Senf, Carol. The Vampirre in 19th English Literature. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1998.
Seltzer, Sarah. That’s What Vampires Are For: Fangs, Sex and Society. Huffington Post, 2009.
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