An extract here from Roger Luckhurst’s excellent introduction to the OUP World’s Classics edition of Dracula. The notion that the vampire is universal and archetypal is debunked, and its origins shown to lie in the Enlightenment response to folkloric panics in early eighteenth-century Eastern Europe.
http://blog.oup.com/2015/04/dracula-vampire-mythology-early-modern-europe/
