With the recent success of the tetralogy Twilight by U.S. writer Stephenie Meyer, and of the first film based upon it, vampires are once again in the limelight.
For more than a century, Dracula and his cronies have been omnipresent in fantasy literature and cinema, and have been fascinating a constantly growing and ever more diversified public to such an extent that it is no exaggeration to claim that we are now dealing with a genuine modern-day myth.
The purpose of this book's 50 questions is to examine this myth's distant origins in order to better grasp why and how it has become one of the contemporary imaginary's most popular themes. What is a vampire ? Where does it come from ? How did it become a part of modern literature ? Why has it become one of the recurrent themes of today's fantasy cinema ? Lastly, why do vampires continue to be a source of fascination in what has become a rationalist world ?

Jean Marigny is a Professor Emeritus at Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3 (English and American Literature), where he founded the Groupe d'études et de recherches sur le Fantastique. In addition to a thesis on vampires in Anglo-Saxon literature, he is the author of Sang pour sang, le Réveil des vampires (Découvertes Gallimard, 1992) and Le Vampire dans la littérature du XX^e siècle (Champion, 2003), as well as of anthologies, collective works and numerous articles.