The Myth Of Dracula By Bram Stoker

There are questions which have engaged human societies since the beginning of recorded history. One of the biggest myths is life itself, and, concomitantly, what happens with the body and soul after death. Various mythological creatures have served as attempts to answer the latter of the two problems. Almost every culture has its own kind of 'vampire', although most of them would not be recognized as such by modern readers. The origin of the vampire myth is ambiguous, but some scholars have traced its roots back to ancient Asian gods of death, and found similar aspects in old Greek and Egyptian conceptualizations of the afterlife (Varma). The Arab world knows the ghoul, a demon which feasts on dead bodies, the Romans adopted the Lamia – a beautiful young women with a non-metaphorical taste for young men – from Greek mythology, and the Indian goddess Kali lived on human blood (Beresford); some of these creatures are their own supernatural species while others are revenants, humans who have returned from death. But even the latter have little in common with the graceful, aristocratic and seductive figure that is Count Dracula, the archetypal literary vampire. Although he was not the first of his kind, many scholars agree that no other text shaped the image of the vampire to a greater extent than Bram Stoker's novel. For more than half a decade the term 'vampire' was synonymous with the …show more content…
Romantic poets in particular saw great appeal in vampirism as a combination of many popular motifs of the epoch. The first section of this paper explores how the Romantic depiction of vampirism in poems and ballads inspired John William Polidori's novella The Vampyre (1819), which is often considered the first real vampire narrative, the implications of the term vampirism in the early stage of vampire fiction, and how certain literary conventions led to the establishment of the Dracula