‘In Celebration of Her Wickedness?’: Critical Intertextuality and the Female Vampire in Byzantium

Abstract

This chapter explores the role of postmodern intertextuality in Neil Jordan’s 2012 vampire film Byzantium. This intertextuality serves to place the film in dialogue with earlier vampire fiction, in particular the 1970s cycle of British and European erotic vampire films such as Daughters of Darkness and The Vampire Lovers from Hammer Films. Byzantium recalls these earlier texts structurally and thematically, both through direct reference and more oblique allusions.

While Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodern intertextuality as mere nostalgia and the imitation of ‘dead styles’, feminist postmodern theorists such as Linda Hutcheon contend argue for the political potential of postmodernism. This chapter proposes that the postmodern intertextuality of Byzantium is a critical intertextuality, and that the foregrounding of storytelling, writing, and rewriting in the film draws attention to the ways in which the intertextuality of Byzantium is not merely a return to past forms but also a reworking of them.

Taking up the work of Linda Hutcheon and Catherine Constable, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which Byzantium critically reworks aspects of earlier vampire fiction in order to critique and expand the representation of the female vampire and through this explore issues relating to female subjectivity and community.

Citation

Denny, M. (2019), "‘In Celebration of Her Wickedness?’: Critical Intertextuality and the Female Vampire in Byzantium ", Holland, S., Shail, R. and Gerrard, S. (Ed.) Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film (Emerald Studies in Popular Culture and Gender), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 117-132. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78769-897-020191009