Dracula

• "Stoker's masterpiece has been called 'the first great work of modern horror'" - Stephen King
• "The vampire is the most terrifying figure in all literature" - Stephen King
• • ‘Most of the delightful old superstitions of the past have an unhappy way of appearing limp and sickly in the glare of a later day’ Manchester Guardian 1897 
• 'A tale that will make your blood run cold' - The Times 1897
• 'Dracula is not merely a story, but a psychological study' - H.P Lovecraft
• • ‘It is for the man with sound conscience and digestion’ (women) Pall Mall Gazette 1897 
• • ‘Dracula to the end seems only too reasonably and sanely possible’ Glasgow Herald 1897 
• • ‘Mr Stoker succeeds in creating the sense of possibility in impossibility’ The Athenaeum 1897  
• • Dracula’s ability to turn into fog is a metaphor for ‘the transgression of these boundaries by a disembodied, invading pollution upsets a discourse of hygiene, it links to the invading foreigner to filth and disease’ - Stewart  
• ‘The ambivalent way in which women are represented in the novel describes the horror and threat of vampirism as a contagious evil.’ Frost
• • ‘These symptoms… point to the shadowy world of dreams, repressed desires and the supernatural world outside the rational daylight world of an increasingly affluent, increasingly materialistic Victorian society.’ Frost 
• • ‘The evil of Dracula then is not just that he displays a preference for victimising women; the particularly disturbing quality of this evil to Victorian readers was the perversion of matrimony and the challenge to procreation.’ Frost 
• • ‘The predominance of bedroom scenes in the novel… emphasises the extent to which sexual prurience underlies the fabric of Stoker’s text, making evident the thinly-veiled sexual voyeurism and propensities of the Victorian era.’ Green 
• ‘The explicit and voyeuristic presentation of sex and sexuality in ‘Dracula’ shows them as diseases, haunting the late-Victorian world.’ Green
• ‘Phallic Instrument, gang rape’ Showalter
• • ‘men are still seen as dominating and controlling the agency by which  women are recognised as intelligent, a woman is intelligent if or because men think she thinks like them’ Cranny-Francis 

   
• ‘the vampire is a symbol of male sexuality and its threat to female purity’ Creed
• Dracula 'represents real life victorian sociopolitical horrors' - Auerback