Dracula | Literary Precedents
Dracula has considerable cultural importance. Stoker was not the first writer to make use of the vampire legend. Throughout the nineteenth century vampires appeared in a number of works, including Sheridan Le-Fanu's Carmilla (1872), which Stoker read as a young man. But it is Stoker's version of the vampire legend that has had the most enduring popular appeal and the greatest influence on twentieth-century writers and filmmakers. In his book Vampires Unearthed (1983), Martin Riccardo tells the story of a survey taken by Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum to determine the world's "most hated...
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