In that year alone, more than half a dozen influential books and essays on Dracula were published. You might say it was when Count Dracula received his invitation into the academy. Today Tolkien's works are universally considered classics, but no English departments began to study them seriously until a sufficient groundswell of popularity encouraged it, and still some academics look down their noses at the idea of studying Tolkien's "fantasy" as literature, even though he was an Oxford graduate, fellow, and professor of Anglo-Saxon and English language and literatureġ972 was a watershed year for Dracula studies. Compare it to the mid-twentieth century reception of J.R.R. Bram's story was received as a fantasy-thriller, not a work of serious literature or belles-lettres. Here, oddly enough, the same reasons for Dracula's popularity may have worked against its reputation among scholars. Given Dracula's popularity, it may come as a surprise that for almost seventy-five years after the novel's publication, only two scholarly essays and one book centering on Dracula were written: Bacil Kirtley's "Dracula, the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic Folk-Lore" (1956), Richard Wasson's "The Politics of Dracula" (1966), and Harry Ludlam's biography, A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (1962).
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