One of Christopher Frayling's intentions in first compiling his book Vampyres in 1978, reissued in 2016 in a handsome expanded edition, was to give vampirism the academic credit it deserves as a literary phenomenon. It would be another 10 years before Bram Stoker immortalised Vlad in his famous novel. The bloodthirsty prince makes a brief appearance in a narrative about the horrors of autocracy. As the BBC’s Dracula shows, we can still be in thrall to vampires – just as we have been for centuriesĪ fact often overlooked about Das Kapital by Karl Marx is that it was the first book in English literature to feature Vlad Dracula, more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler, in anything other than a purely historical guise.
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