By: Amy Jelf,
on 6/12/2015
Now that the second season of the Oxford World's Classics Reading Group is drawing to a close, let's see how much you've learnt from reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. Test your knowledge of all things Vampire with our quiz.
The post How much do you know about Dracula?[quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 4/22/2015
The date-line is 2014. An outbreak of a deadly disease in a remote region, beyond the borders of a complacent Europe. Local deaths multiply. The risk does not end with death, either, because corpses hold the highest risk of contamination and you must work to contain their threat. All this is barely even reported at first, until the health of a Western visitor, a professional man, breaks down.
The post Why bother reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 4/15/2015
There were many books on vampires before Bram Stoker's Dracula. Early anthropologists wrote accounts of the folkloric vampire -- a stumbling, bloated peasant, never venturing far from home, and easily neutralized with a sexton’s spade and a box of matches. The literary vampire became a highly mobile, svelte aristocratic rake with the appearance of the short tale The Vampyre in 1819.
The post Before Bram: a timeline of vampire literature appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 4/8/2015
Although occultists like the antiquarian Montague Summers would like to claim that the belief in vampires is global and transhistorical (and therefore probably true), the vampire is a thoroughly modern being. Like the Gothic genre itself, stories of vampires emerge in the Age of Enlightenment, as instances of primitive superstition that help define the rational scepticism of northern, Protestant Europe.
The post The birth of the vampyre: Dracula and mythology in Early Modern Europe appeared first on OUPblog.
