The Vampire Genre Attempt to define the vampire genre by tracing it's history. Discuss also the importance of generic conventions and audience expectation.
When discussing vampire genre we must first try to define what a genre is. A genre is a particular type of media commodity. It has certain features and characteristics that are recognised by audiences because is repeatedly used. However, they can never clearly be defined as there is never a set definition to one genre. There is what the audience expects which is quite often for filled but in addition to that there is sometimes new innovations introduced in a genre which the audience are willing to accept.
Although Bram Stoker did not invent the notion of the vampire, his book Dracula is probably the model on which the vampire genre is based. The myth of the vampire being an un-dead creature that roamed the night drinking the blood of the living goes back to ancient Greek times.
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Dracula (first edition cover), Bram Stoker's vampi...
Bram Stoker's (1847-1912) Notes on the personal fo...However Stoker introduced a number of more particular conventions that are usually followed in the vampire genre even today.
First published in 1897, the story is told through the diaries of a young solicitor, Jonathan Harker, his fiancee Mina, her friend Lucy Westenra and Dr John Seward, the superintendent of a large mental asylum at Purfleet in Essex. It begins with Harker's journey to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania in connection with the Count's purchase of an estate adjoining Dr Seward's asylum. After various horrifying experiences at the castle Harker makes his way to a ruined chapel, where he finds fifty great wooden boxes filled with earth recently dug from the graveyard of the Draculas, in one of which the un-dead Count is lying. These boxes are sent to Whitby where Dracula disembarks in the shape of a...