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Frontier Horror, Gothic Anxiety And Colonial Monsters In The Vampire Diaries

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The peer-reviewed article I chose for this assignment is “Original sin: Frontier horror, gothic anxiety and colonial monsters in The Vampire Diaries”. The author of the article is Rebecca M. Lush from California State University San Marcos. The article focuses on how the show incorporates literary tropes from the early American period commonly used to represent native Americans. The article also emphasizes how The Vampire Diaries reproduces colonial rationalizations and rhetoric of land claim and discovery that disenfranchise Native peoples but also allows for ambivalent critiques of the colonial project. The article compares the vampire diaries to several television shows that reproduces literary tropes such as Supernatural, Sleepy Hollow and …show more content…

The vampire diaries revolves around the love story of two vampire brothers Stephen and Damon Salvatore (Paul Wesley and Ian Somerholder) as they become entangled in a love triangle with Nina Dobrev. The mikaelson’s settled in Virginian soil the early 1000’s in Viking era European settlement. In the Vampire Diaries, Vampires were created through blood magic by their mother Esther Michaelson to prevent her children from being harmed from impending forces such as werewolves. Subsequently, the children were christened with the name the originals which refers to their status as the first vampires. Since the originals were the first vampires they started the entire population of vampires on the earth through traditional means. The originals are stronger than the subsequent generations of vampires due to being the original. The article refers to the vampire diaries as being steeped in the tradition of the American gothic. The vampire diaries made extensive use of the uncanny and doubling and key gothic conventions of the Atlantic through a supernatural character called the

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