Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Dracula, Bram Stoker - S. L. Varnado (essay date 1987)
Dracula, Bram Stoker - S. L. Varnado (essay date 1987)
S. L. Varnado (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: Varnado, S. L. “The Daemonic in Dracula.” In Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction, pp. 95-114. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1987.
[In the following essay, Varnado views Dracula as a dramatization of the “cosmic struggle between the opposing forces of darkness and light, of the sacred and the profane.”]
Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of those rare novels that merits the timeworn phrase “it needs no introduction.” Since its publication in 1897 the book has established an undeniable claim on the public imagination. Not only has it passed through innumerable editions (including foreign translations), it has entered the domain of popular culture through constant dramatizations, including radio, motion pictures, and television. The world has taken the book's grim protagonist to its heart in a way reserved for only a few mythical figures. In...
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- Principal Works
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Criticism
- Spectator (review date 31 July 1897)
- Bacil F. Kirtley (essay date fall 1956)
- Joseph S. Bierman (essay date summer 1972)
- Carrol L. Fry (essay date fall 1972)
- Seymour Shuster (essay date September 1973)
- Judith Weissman (essay date July 1977)
- Phyllis A. Roth (essay date 1982)
- Alan P. Johnson (essay date 1984)
- David Seed (essay date June 1985)
- Clive Leatherdale (essay date 1985)
- S. L. Varnado (essay date 1987)
- Ken Gelder (essay date 1994)
- Stephan Schaffrath (essay date spring 2002)
- Christopher Herbert (essay date summer 2002)
- Dennis Foster (essay date 2002)
- Gregory Castle (essay date 2002)
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