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Joseph Le Fanu

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish journalist and short story writer, most famously known for Carmilla (1872), a vampire tale that predates (and most likely inspired) Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 26 years.

Sheridan was born on August 28, 1814 to Huguenot parents with literary pedigree—his grandmother and his great-uncle were playwrights, and his mother had written a biography of Irish physician and clergyman Charles Orpen. His father, Thomas Philip Le Fanu, was a Protestant clergyman. The...

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Joseph Le Fanu Essays

College

Carmilla

In an essay concerning the components of the Romantic novel, James P. Carson frames the difference between Gothic and Romantic attitudes as a “disagreement over values inherent in attempts to represent people” (Matthews). He succinctly describes...

College

Carmilla

Sleep is a physically and mentally vulnerable state; the body is unconscious, unsuspecting, and the mind is visited frequently by an array of distorted images called dreams. Only devilish and cruel predators hunt sleeping prey, when struggle is...

College

Carmilla

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,...

College

Carmilla

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...