Editing Vampire literature (section)

===18th century===
Vampire fiction is rooted in the "vampire craze" of the 1720s and 1730s, which culminated in the somewhat bizarre official exhumations of suspected vampires [[Petar Blagojevich]] and [[Arnold Paole]] in [[Serbia]] under the [[Habsburg monarchy]]. One of the first works of art to touch upon the subject is the short German poem ''The Vampire'' (1748) by [[Heinrich August Ossenfelder]], where the theme already has strong erotic overtones: a man whose love is rejected by a respectable and pious maiden threatens to pay her a nightly visit, drink her blood by giving her the seductive kiss of the vampire and thus prove to her that his teaching is better than her mother's [[Christianity]].<ref>An English translation, by Aloysius Gibson, appears in ''The Vampire in Verse: An Anthology,'' ed. Steven Moore (Chicago: Adams Press, 1985), p. 12.</ref> Furthermore, there have been a number of tales about a dead person returning from the grave to visit his/her beloved or spouse and bring them death in one way or another, the [[narrative poem]] ''[[Lenore (ballad)|Lenore]]'' (1773) by [[Gottfried August Bürger]] being a notable 18th-century example (though the apparently returned lover is actually revealed to be death himself in disguise). One of its lines, ''Denn die Todten reiten schnell'' ("For the dead ride fast"), was to be quoted in Bram Stoker's classic ''Dracula''. A later German poem exploring the same subject with a prominent vampiric element was ''[[:de:Die_Braut_von_Korinth|The Bride of Corinth]]'' (1797) by [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe]], a story about a young woman who returns from the grave to seek her betrothed:

{{poemquote|From my grave to wander I am forced
Still to seek the God's long sever'd link,
Still to love the bridegroom I have lost,
And the lifeblood of his heart to drink.}}

The story is turned into an expression of the conflict between [[Paganism|Heathendom]] and Christianity: the family of the dead girl are Christians, while the young man and his relatives are still pagans. It turns out that it was the girl's Christian mother who broke off her engagement and forced her to become a nun, eventually driving her to her death. The motive behind the girl's return as a "spectre" is that "e'en Earth can never cool down love". Goethe had been inspired by the story of ''[[Philinnion]]'' by [[Phlegon of Tralles]], a tale from [[classical Greece]]. However, in that tale, the youth is not the girl's betrothed, no religious conflict is present, no actual sucking of blood occurs, and the girl's return from the dead is said to be sanctioned by the gods of the [[Greek underworld|Underworld]]. She relapses into death upon being exposed, and the issue is settled by burning her body outside of the city walls and making an [[apotropaic]] sacrifice to the deities involved.