"Vampiric Reading": Dracula and Readerly Desire

This essay investigates the literal acts of reading in Bram Stoker's Dracula. All the characters in Dracula—including Dracula himself—are obsessive readers. I coin the concept of "vampiric reading" as a particular aesthetic model and pattern of reading acts performed by the novel's characters. "Vampiric reading" indicates one's love of reading texts, a "love" that then elicits others to indulge in more reading—much like the actual vampirism in the novel, in which one's blood/desire is transfused with another's. The novel also guarantees its afterlife in a future of undead reading with the model of vampiric reading that we can emulate.