DOI: 10.47777/cankujhss.1834279 ISSN: 1309-6761

Transtextual Evolution of Vampire in Western and Turkish Cultures: From Revenants and Oburs to Aristocrats

Ahen Sena Yılmaz, Ayşe Selmin Söylemez
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ABSTRACT This study analyzes the evolution of the vampire image from the earliest prose examples to the first literary works, both in Western and Turkish cultures. The corpus consists of the medieval Western chronicles that include revenant narratives, such as William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum (1196) and Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium (1190), the first Turkish folkloric vampire narratives taking place in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyehatname (1666), and the first literary Western and Turkish examples of vampire characters, J. William Polidori’s The Vampire (1819) and Ali Rıza Seyfi’s Kazıklı Voyvoda (1928). The study uses a qualitative content analysis guided by Genette’s theory of transtextuality, that is, hypertextuality and architextuality, the techniques that enable the analysis of the relationships between texts and between texts and genre definitions. This approach seeks not only to observe what shifts are visible when the story is transposed into different forms but to show how the generic contracts of each host architext (Latin chronicle, travelogue, Gothic text, and nationalist adventure prose) systematically define what vampires mean, how they function, and who is legitimate as their monster hunter. The findings illustrate that the reason for the story’s enduring appeal lies less in thematic concerns of immortality, vampirism, and Christianity than in the structural pliability of vampires as objects that transact across different texts. Each architextual regime (e.g., William of Newburgh’s clerical truth claim, Polidori’s Gothic ambiguity, Seyfi’s nationalist resolution) involves an entirely different hypertextual adaptation of the vampire myths but also represents a distinct configuration of fears in society and legitimate institutional authorities. As a result, the study argues the vampire’s universalization is best understood not as a process of cultural diffusion but as a series of governed transtextual operations in which genre contracts silently authorize what the monster may be, what it threatens, and who has the power to defeat it.

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