Dracula

Told in journal fragments that cannot provide any reliable perspective, Dracula (1897) is at the same time intensely Romantic and very modern. It unfolds the story of a Transylvanian Don Juan, the aristocratic vampire Count Dracula, who preys on desirous damsels, and of the mission launched to destroy him from the perplexingly appropriate setting of a lunatic asylum. Dracula, perhaps the ultimate terror myth, probes deeply into the questions of human identity and sanity, sexual power versus sexual desire, and what Freud was to call 'the return of the repressed'. Bram Stoker's masterpiece embodies a struggle which, as Maurice Hindle remarks, is the struggle to recover 'an embattled male's deepest sense of himself as male'.