What impact did Bram Stoker have on the horror genre with the creation of Dracula? And how well did he understand that impact?
A. To answer the second part first, Stoker had no idea of the impact his novel would make. To begin with, it was only fairly popular in his own day (and with non-intellectual readers), and was seen by reviewers as just a story of horror and the supernatural. What brought Dracula to the foreground was the movie industry. Stoker did not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of that popularity. Dracula is indeed the touchstone of vampire literature and has become the yardstick by which every vampire story is measured. Part of this is because it came at the “right” time. There had been other vampire stories before Stoker’s (starting with John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” in 1819 and throughout the 19th century) and Stoker drew the various threads together. Another factor is the time at which it was written – late Victorian England, end-of-century anxiety, latent sexuality, etc. One of the reasons the novel has received so much attention from late 20th century literary critics is that it opens a
