Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend

The vampire apocalypse is a fairly unlikely event, but it makes for great storytelling. Richard Matheson's 1954 I Am Legend is a milestone in modern Gothic literature; it tells the bleak story of Robert Neville, sole survivor of a vampire plague. I employ the concepts of evolved human nature, cultural ecology, and authorial identity as my main analytical tools for understanding the appeal, the power, and the significance of Matheson's classic novel, which is basically an extrapolation on peculiar yet common anxieties and a meditation on what happens when basic adaptive needs are frustrated.

[1]  John Tooby,et al.  Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts , 2001 .

[2]  P. Barber,et al.  Vampires, burial, and death : folklore and reality , 1990 .

[3]  E. Rabkin,et al.  Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy , 1996 .

[4]  Benson Saler,et al.  Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters and the Mind , 2005, The Construction of the Supernatural in Euro-American Cultures.

[5]  Martin H. Levinson.  Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution , 2006 .

[6]  Evolution of the Psyche , 1999 .

[7]  R. Nesse,et al.  Fear and fitness: an evolu-tionary analysis of anxiety disorders , 1994 .

[8]  P. Richerson,et al.  Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. , 2004 .

[9]  Nancy Easterlin,et al.  Hans Christian Andersen's Fish Out of Water , 2001 .

[10]  M. Jancovich.  Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s , 1996 .

[11]  F. Turner,et al.  Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts , 1999 .

[12]  N. Wade.  Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors , 2006 .

[13]  D. Suvin,et al.  On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre , 1972, College English.

[14]  Brian Boyd,et al.  On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction , 2009 .

[15]  L. Cosmides,et al.  Consider the source: The evolution of adaptations for decoupling and metarepresentation , 2000 .

[16]  E. Dissanayake,et al.  Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why , 1992 .

[17]  J. Carroll.  The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of Literature , 2006 .

[18]  S. Mithen.  The prehistory of the mind: a search for the origins of art, religion and science , 1999 .

[19]  J. Tooby,et al.  In : Metarepresentations : A Multidisciplinary Perspective , 2000 .

[20]  R. Steinbock.  Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality , 1989 .

[21]  Joseph A. Carroll.  The Cuckoo's History: Human Nature in Wuthering Heights , 2008 .

[22]  L. Cosmides,et al.  The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments , 1990 .

[23]  S. Mithen.  The Prehistory of the Mind , 1996 .