Dracula Essay | Critical Essay #3

Dracula Critical Essay #3

In the following essay, Stott discusses the decadent gothic genre and how the qualities of Dracula place the novel in that genre.

When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897 he was able to draw upon a century-long tradition of interest in vampirism, firmly associated with the exotic fantasies of romanticism and with the theme of seduction and evil. By 1913 the book was in its 10th edition. After its first stage production in 1930 the sales of the book doubled and by the 1930's the first vampire films began to emerge. With the extraordinary number of subsequent films produced this century, Dracula has become a 20th-century myth of unparalleled resonance.

Stoker's text has been the focus of renewed critical interest in the last few decades, as the subject of a plethora of critical readings and interpretations: Marxist, Freudian, feminist, and Darwinian. As fantasy, drawing on one of the...
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