Deconstructing Dracula: The Reality Behind the Myth

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Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2, 3, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: Surveying English Literatures II: Epistolary Fiction, language: English, abstract: When we hear the name "Dracula", nearly everybody in our society today immediately thinks about vampires, horror and Transylvania. The material has been commercialized throughout the last century, dozens of different films and theatrical versions have been brought to life which concern themselves with the history of the dark count, the king of all vampires. The actual story is hereby often distorted, the themes of the novel forgotten and the material reduced to often rather cheap horror stories without the deeper aspects of repressed female sexuality or the threat of modernity that critics have dealt with so often. But what are the actual themes of the novel? In the following I want to explore some of the themes, taking into consideration a few papers by contemporary scholars, and then have a look at how far those themes have actually been constructed. And I want to start out by making the rather extreme claim, that there is no Dracula at all in the novel. What I mean by that will become obvious in the progress of my argument.