Bram Stoker's Dracula
According to Elizabeth Miller's research, Bram Stoker was going to call his vampire Count Wampyr until he came across a small section about Vlad the Impaler in a book he was researching entitled An Account of The Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820). According to Stoker's notes, what attracted him to the name "Dracula" was a footnote by Wilkinson which stated that "Dracula in the Wallachian language means devil". I wonder if Count Wampyr would have found the same popularity as Count Dracula.
Be sure to read The Shadow of the Vampire by Gabriel Ronay, the author of The Dracula Myth. http://www.hungary.com/hungq/no151/117.h... This interesting article looks at how Dracula and Vlad the Impaler have been treated by both the West and the East. Did you know that during World War II, we portrayed German soldiers as vampires or that Dracula was for many years a banned book in Romania or that both Ireland and England issued Count Dracula postage stamps? (To see what these stamps and other vampires stamps look like visit http://www.thegrid.net/fern.canyon/vampi... ) Ronay also takes a look at Elizabeth Bathori, whom he considers to be the real vampire.
For some more information, check out http://www.nhmccd.cc.tx.us/contracts/lrc... Bram Stoker, Dracula, from the Kingwood College Library. The page was designed as a student resource for an English class and includes an interesting biography, as well as analysis of the plot and characters, and lists other resources for further study.
There are many eBook versions of Dracula available. One of the most interesting is a hypertext version created by Harold J. Hotchkiss for a Literary Hypertext class taught at the University of Buffalo in the spring '99. http://fiddlingfrog.freeyellow.com/dracu... -- You can eliminate the annoying Free Yellow pop-up window that appears with every page change by hitting the minimize button. What makes this version unique is the different ways that one can read the book. In addition to the complete story and being able to go to a particular chapter, you can access the story in chronological order, or read all the passages written in one character's viewpoint, or by clicking on a location on a map, read all the scenes written at that location.
Perhaps it is time to re-read an old classic. Or how about Dracula's Guest, a short story that was cut from Dracula at the publisher's request and published in a collection of short stories two years after his death!
http://www.ferncanyonpress.com/vampires/...
Or read The Lady of the Shroud which is supposed to be another vampire novel by Bram Stoker.
http://www.geocities.com/psmcalduff/2lad... http://www.blackmask.com/Gothic_Tales/Br...
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