Well, you could say that Bram Stoker invented Vampires (but there was a folk tradition so he was just the first person to write it down) But for SURE Anne Rice knew Dracula and thought deeply about what made it scary and what might make a modern day vampire tale compelling. And for sure people like Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris absorbed Stoker and Rice and figured out what they could do to update it further.

Because of these kind of influences the gravity of Stoker is inescapable if you want to write Vampire stories.

And what I would say about self-sacrifice, and certainly creative non-violence, is that it doesn't seem to exist in pre-Christian heroic tales. The world is pretty brutal and best you can hope for is glory that echoes through eternity because you killed someone or something. And if you were strong enough, and killed enough people, they would turn you into a god (Heracles)

We can ask the same question about romance as a genre. Romantic love in stories seems to be an invention of the Middle Ages. And, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that Pride and Prejudice isn't in the running for best RomCom of all time.

So it's not that the earliest books get credit with inventing these things, it's that they start the chain of influence. So we can accept their influence, or reject their influence, but we can't escape it any more than a fish can escape the water. For me the only way to be thoughtful about how I deal with those sources is to understand them.