Count Dracula vs Vlad the Impaler. In Chapter 18 of Dracula, Van Helsing says this of the Count: “He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land” (291). Very little attention was paid to the possible connection between the fictional Count and his historical namesake until 1972 when Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally’s In Search of Dracula revealed to the world the story of the real Dracula – Vlad Tepes.
This was closely followed by McNally’s fortuitous discovery that the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia had acquired Stoker’s working papers for Dracula, which prove conclusively that he did know about the existence of the “Voivode Dracula.” Dracula studies have not been the same since. It has become commonplace to assume that Stoker was inspired by accounts of the Impaler’s atrocities and deliberately modeled his Dracula on the life and character of Vlad. And later, How much did Bram Stoker know about the historical Dracula?
"Fragment of a Novel"/Byron. "June 17, 1816. "In the year 17—, having for some time determined on a journey through countries not hitherto much frequented by travellers, I set out, accompanied by a friend, whom I shall designate by the name of Augustus Darvell. He was a few years my elder, and a man of considerable fortune and ancient family, advantages which an extensive capacity prevented him alike from undervaluing and overrating. Some peculiar circumstances in his private history had rendered him to me an object of attention, of interest, and even of regard, which neither the reserve of his manners, nor occasional indication of an inquietude at times approaching to alienation of mind, could extinguish. "I was yet young in life, which I had begun early; but my intimacy with him was of a recent date: we had been educated at the same schools and university; but his progress through these had preceded mine, and he had been deeply initiated into what is called the world, while I was yet in my novitiate.
" 'Peace! Ann Radcliffe. Ann Radcliffe was the most popular writer of her day and almost universally admired. Contemporary critics called her the mighty enchantress and the Shakespeare of romance-writers. Her popularity continued through the nineteenth century; for Keats, she was Mother Radcliffe, and for Scott, the first poetess of romantic fiction Little was or is known about Radcliffe's life, so not surprisingly apocryphal stories sprang up about her: it was reported that she had gone mad as a result of her dreadful imagination and been confined to an asylum, that she had been captured as a spy in Paris, or that she ate rare pork chops before retiring to stimulate nightmares for her novels; several times she was falsely rumored to be dead.
She seems to have been happily married and to have been fortunate in having a husband who encouraged her to write. Above all, my dear Emily... do not indulge in the pride of fine feeling, the romantic error of amiable minds. S.L. The Gothic: Meaning and Characteristics. Matthew Lewis. Please note that The Literary Gothic will be shutting down soon. Thanks to all who have visited, and Stay Haunted. 9 July 1775 - 10 May 1818 This unattributed etching of Lewis (you can see what may well be the source by clicking on the "Portraits" link at left) served as the frontispiece to The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis (London: Henry Colburn, 1839). Like Mary Shelley, Lewis made a huge impact with his teenage (and only) novel The Monk, which more or less defined the far edge of sensational Gothicism when it was published in 1796. Sites: Etexts: Adelmorn the Outlaw Available as e-facsimile in PDF. "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine" "The Anaconda" From Lewis' collection Romantic Tales, a 4-volume work first published in 1808; this collection was a hodge-podge, many of its pieces adapted from European sources. [1808] The Bravo of Venice The Castle Spectre The entire etext of Lewis's 1796 Gothic drama, possibly his most successful and well-known drama, is finally available.
Clara Reeve. Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes. The Thomas Gray Archive : Primary Texts : Digital Library : An Elegy wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) : Page [1] - University of Oxford. Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat - Gray. The Thomas Gray Archive : Materials : Biography - University of Oxford. Grave_blair. Robert Blair. Scottish poet and minister, one of the more prominent members of the Graveyard School (sometimes regarded as the "founding father" of the whole enterprise, although Thomas Parnell's "Night Piece on Death" was in fact earlier), Blair is best known for The Grave, which went through 49 editions by 1798, the year Wordsworth and Coleridge published their watershed work of Romantic poetry, Lyrical Ballads.
Blair's poem continued to be popular well into the C19. The Grave [1743] At times, with Graveyard School poetry, it can be difficult to see those elements which would have influenced Gothic fiction, especially in the more horrific manifestations of the form. With Blair's poem, however, there's no such difficulty; this work is flat-out, delightfully horrific, at least in its opening couple of hundred lines (the poem gets much less "graveyardy," and much more moralistic, in its later two-thirds) . - complete etext - Longer excerpt (the first 236 lines) [PDF] - Sample pages Voller, Jack G.
Britlitwiki.wikispaces.