Writer of one of the world's most famous horror novels, Abraham Stoker was born to the loosely defined socio-cultural group known as the Anglo-Irish. A Protestant Dubliner, he was the son of a civil servant, and he was expected to follow in his father's footsteps. As a child, Abraham Stoker was a sickly child often on the point of death?by his own account, he never stood upright without aid until he was seven years old. But he grew into a physically robust youth, excelling in...
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The appearance of the Gothic in architecture of the Middle Ages was the start point and muse of Gothic Literary. The lack of simplicity, symmetry, regularity and nonconformation to nature inspired the features of Gothic Literature: horror/ terror,...
The opening chapters of Dracula by Bram Stoker set the scene atmospherically and build the feeling of fear steadily through a combination of themes which were feared in Victorian times. Gothic literature was a new and exciting concept for the...
Bram Stoker’s revolutionary novel Dracula gave way to the splendor of modernism. Displaying many ground breaking modernist techniques, Dracula is especially reliant on the use of a meta-textual narrative. Stoker introduces his novel with a...
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula relies strongly on the construction and deconstruction of binaries. Arguably the most prevalent and important of the various binaries are good vs. evil and dark vs. light. At the beginning of the novel, Stoker...
The epistolary novel structure, first produced by accident in The Persian Letters by Charles Secondat de Montesquieu, is a series of fictional letters or other forms of communication. The structure allows a writer to present different people’s...
Gothic literature uses gender to discuss social norms and explore stereotypes while commenting on whether gender stereotypes should be upheld or disrupted in society. In this essay, I will compare two female characters and two male characters in...
Bram Stoker uses the characters of Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker in his novel Dracula to explore the essential attributes of a “New Woman” in Victorian England. Written during the late nineteenth century, this novel emerged out of a time where the...
Images of the vampire over time show a cohesive relationship with the genre of gothic literature because of its complex and contradictory nature. Gothic literature’s rise as the artistic interaction between the scientific and the supernatural...
The economic instability which fueled the radical political divisions in America during the 1920s more than set the stage for Universal Studios’ rise to Hollywood powerhouse as the home of horror and monsters; it constructed that stage and defined...
“It has been said in literature, excessive sexual behaviour always leads to corruption”
To present the significance of sexual behaviour in both novels is to link the psychological power of sexual impulses over the individual’s moral principles,...
‘Our experience of the world is through the transitory experience of embodiment’.[1] This statement by Marie Mulvey-Roberts exemplifies as to why the body is so prevalent when horror is depicted in the gothic; we exist only within our bodies and...
“Will you marry me?” Throughout the ages, this life-changing question has been asked billions of times all across the world by both men and women. However, not so long ago during the Victorian era, the idea of a woman asking this question was...
With the rise of the Victorian Age, another movement began to develop--the “New Woman.” Considered by some to be the predecessor of modern feminism, this movement marked a change in the attitudes and desires of Victorian woman, with more and more...
In England during the Victorian era, higher classes of society or in other words the elites were the creating and controlling agents of cultural norms and sets of values regulating urban life. Their restrictions drew a plain picture about how...
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact” — Conan Doyle
The fin de siècle was an era wrought with anxieties brought about by emerging modernity — vast technological innovation paired with new scientific knowledge. New enlightenment...
Despite having a multitude of tonally different and often interchanged narratives throughout, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a hotbed of repetitive sensory imagery. However, it would be a disservice to assume that these images recur as the result of a...
Dating back to early history, vampires have persevered through different languages, kings, and cultures as vessels for the parasitic nature of man who preys upon the innocent. Victorian writers, who originally created the vampire, or the original...
Dracula’s abrupt opening declaration that Jonathan Harker “left Munich at 8:35 p.m. on 1st May” does very little in terms of setting the initial scene, though readers find the brief nature of Harker’s diary peeling away to reveal the superstitious...
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is not compiled like most gothic novels; rather it is compiled of many different sources and mediums.These sources are used to tell the history of Count Dracula, a rich vampire, and his evil attempt to create more...
Both Renfield and his subplot in the novel Dracula serve as both a contrast and a parallel to the vampiric characteristics of Count Dracula. While Count Dracula, his three brides, and his victims are shown to be the only true, physical vampires...
Bram Stoker’s Manichean novel relies profoundly on the use of Voice, and the flexibility of his writing style attributes to the realism of the recounts - whilst creating significant depth to the plot. The alternating narrative contributes to the...
