Suspense In Dracula

According to the Victorian Web, a new and budding author named Bram Stoker entered the world in the year 1847, on the eighth of November. From a young age, Stoker loved to read about folklore, and later on in life he aspired to be an author. Although Stoker published several stories, only in the year 1897 did he publish his most well-known novel, Dracula. After this success, Stoker went on to write several other novels, and eventually died in the year 1912. (Scarborough)

Gothic Elements in the “The Tell Tale Heart” The classic short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by one of the all time masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, has always been used as an excellent example of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allen Poe specialized in the art of gothic writing and wrote many stories that portrayed disturbing events and delved deeply into the minds of its characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe revolves the plot around a raving individual who, insisting that he is sane, murders an old man because of his` “vulture eye”. The three main gothic elements that are evident in this story are the unique setting, the theme of death and decay, and the presence of madness.

What would it be like to be a vampire? What would it be like to have a vampire in one’s life? What were the vampires of folklore like? These topics will be reviewed throughout this essay by comparing four of the vampire books and movies. All the vampire movies have some similarities and differences but four literature pieces in particular will be gone through in this comparison.

Gothic Literature is a genre that was popular between 18th to 19th centuries in North Germany. It is always being associated with Dark Romanticism which the emphasize was more on nature, terror and death, horror and many more. It involves dark and gloomy setting and also unexplainable things that are beyond human senses and reason such as ghosts and monsters. The main characters, on the other hand, are always ineffectual which they do not give much effect on the story plot. This can be seen through Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” which can be considered as American gothic work in terms of its description of setting, the involvement of supernatural element in the story and also the characteristics of the main character.

Just as Frankenstein’s monster was the first of a new species of being, so Mary Shelley’s novel was the first of a species of book. Frankenstein is generally accepted to be the first ever science-fiction story (Stableford, 1995), and it incorporates themes that are now considered to be at the core of the genre. However at the time of writing, the genre of science-fiction did not exist, since she had yet to create it. It is therefore imperative to examine how Shelley’s work functions as a piece of gothic literature, taking into account all of the accompanying symbolism and imagery that entails.

The Gothic Novel is considered as an appearance of the late 18th and early 19th century, culminating in Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, first published in 1818. Ideas of that time period surfaced in fictional prose and thus influenced the Gothic Revival at the end of the century, including works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887) as well as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The conception of duality in fictional prose has been a repetitive motif throughout literary history. This double may manifest in form of evil doppelgängers and hence, it reveals the shadow selves of the human kind.

Gothic drama, similarly to the Gothic novels, showed a taste for the macabre and the supernatural. It was chiefly influenced by Charles Maturin’s writings which provided the Gothic drama with a Shakespearian overtone and by James Robinson’s plays that linked the earlier Romantic Gothic with the later Victorian interest in vampires. The Romantic Literature was also distinguished by the interest in nonfictional prose which strengthened with the development of political and periodical writings. These writings generally attended to the themes of democracy and human rights and limned the existing social happenings as a form of apocalyptic change.

The Gothic could mean a specific style of craftsmanship, be it as books, compositions, or structural engineering; it could signify "medieval" or "tactless. " It could even allude to a certain kind of music and its fans. What it initially implied, obviously, is "of, identifying with, or taking after the Goths, their development, or their dialect" ("gothic"). The Gothic is, then, a kind of impersonation medievalism. It was propelled in the later eighteenth century.

In the early 18th century a new genre of fiction prose, named "Gothic Novel" was introduced. The term ”Gothic” used to refer to the German tribe of the Goths, and later on signified ”Germanic”, then ”medieval”. The Gothic novel spread over the 19th century and had the popular theme of haunted places such as castles, crypts, gloomy mansions and convents; supernatural elements having the role to intensify the atmosphere.

Gothic Literature started in the mid 1700’s in Europe. This form of writing began to grow more popular through the works of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Emily Brontes. In America, gothic literature grew popular by the works of Edgar A. Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. These writers grew more popular during the Romantic Era, which started in the late 1700’s, but it’s peak was from about 1800-1850. In Edgar A. Poe’s horror stories and poems, he uses several different gothic elements.