چکیده (انگلیسی):

My dear, it is splendid, a thousand miles beyond anything you have written before.”
---Charlotte Stoker, mother of Bram, commenting on Dracula
When it comes to creating literary characters of mythic proportions, nobody
does it better than the Irish. Consider that within a ten-year period (1887-1897) three
sons of Gael---Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker---gave to the
world Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, and Dracula. Interestingly, all three authors, if
not quite intimate friends, were certainly on cordial terms. Stoker attended Doyle’s
1907 wedding to Jean Leckie. Oscar Wilde, for his part, was a fairly frequent guest at
Stoker’s London home and had even been a former suitor of Bram’s beautiful wife,
Florence (nee Balcombe).
Like Wilde, Bram Stoker was a student at Trinity College, Dublin (1864-68).
There, as a member of the college philosophical society, he presented an essay entitled
“Sensationalism in fiction and society.”
2
Starting in 1875, Stoker would put his own
views on “sensationalism” into regular practice with a series of short stories and
novels, most of them in the horror genre. His most successful novels (not counting
Dracula) bore such lurid titles as The Lair of the White Worm, The Jewel of Seven Stars, and
The Lady of the Shroud. The great majority of Stoker’s exotic stories were mediocre at
best, though many sold reasonably well.