The new face of the vampire: Autobiographical fiction in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles

Abstract

This thesis studies how particular events in Anne Rice’s life have had impact in the context of her written work and how she as a writer manages to influence her works with these experiences from a twice-removed perspective. It presents how from these events in her life Rice was able to create a respectable verisimilitude by writing a series of vampire mock autobiographies she called The Vampire Chronicles. As an author, she revolutionized the genre of Literary Horror and Vampire Fiction and made an impact in how later works in the genre were portrayed. This impact being such, that it can be used to show how the mock narratives in Rice’s Chronicles can be used as metaphors to represent social minorities struggling to find an identity, solace and redemption in larger social strata.