Dracula, Bram Stoker - Christopher Herbert (essay date summer 2002)

Christopher Herbert (essay date summer 2002)

SOURCE: Herbert, Christopher. “Vampire Religion.” Representations 79 (summer 2002): 100-21.

[In the following essay, Herbert offers a religious interpretation of Dracula.]

Here chiefly, Lord, we feed on Thee, And drink Thy precious Blood.

—Charles Wesley1

RELIGION/SUPERSTITION

Once consigned to the limbo of the subliterary, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) has attained canonical status by gaining recognition as a pioneering exploration of forbidden zones of sex.2 The strong religious thrust of this novel has correspondingly been ignored, not to say suppressed, in recent criticism: acknowledging the primacy of a broad vein of late-Victorian religious sentiment in Stoker's sensationalistic Gothic tale has evidently seemed to its interpreters hard to square with claiming it as a significant literary object—or...

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