Dracula

Told entirely through letters, diaries, telegrams and newspaper clippings, the novel assembles its story the way a case file does — which is the point, since its heroes are a solicitor, a doctor, a schoolmistress with a typewriter and a professor, using railway timetables and blood transfusions against something that predates all of them. It is the source text for the modern vampire, and reads in a curriculum as a study of how a competent, documentary, technological society handles a threat it cannot at first admit exists.

Context: Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was business manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre while he wrote it. Dracula appeared in 1897 and was one of several late-Victorian novels he published; it is the only one still widely read.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Bram Stoker — the author.