Bram Stoker’s "Dracula." A Study on the Human Mind and Paranoid Behaviour
17 Pages
The Victorian fin-de-siècle experienced the growth of scientific naturalism, and witnessed the birth and development of sciences such as modern psychology, supported by the scientific efforts to unravel the processes of the human mind. Nevertheless, the 1890s were also notable for the participation of educated people in Spiritualism and other occult activities, their interest in folklore of all sorts and the writing of a great corpus of fantasy literature. The aim of this essay is to offer a reading of Bram Stoker’s "Dracula" as an example of the dialogue established between science, literature and the study of the supernatural in Victorian England. The novel, as part of the fin-de-siècle scientific period, can be interpreted as a conscious inquiry into the functioning of the mind and, most especially, into the aetiology of paranoid behaviour. Thus, Stoker’s text becomes a testimony of a mental disorder known as folie à deux, or shared madness
A ‘Crisis of Victorianism’: Sexuality and Discourses of Degeneration in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite.
17 Pages
Discourses of degeneration were ubiquitous during the latter half of the nineteenth-century, thus approaching Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Conan Doyle’s The Parasite (1894) as an historical text is not to read them in isolation as a neutral report of the sociological climate of late Victorian Britain, but as part of a dialogue. Spencer (1992) notes, ‘Dracula is not an isolated phenomenon, but is part of a literary/cultural discourse’ (p.198). As part of this discourse Stoker’s Dracula can bring to light elements of the dialectic between the bulwarks of Victorian society and the attack of the New at the fin de siècle. Luckhurst in his introduction to Dracula (2011) states, ‘historical distance reveals the book to be an uncanny echo-box of its place and time’ (p.xix).Taking into less consideration Bram Stoker’s position as a representative of late-Victorian ‘Man’, and reading Dracula as a representative late-Victorian text presents, as such, a text that is particularly revealing in its focus on Victorian sexual dynamics
"The Victorian's Vampire: Stoker's Dracula as the Monstrous Embodiment of Deformity, Disease, and Crime"
"Vampire in Literature, Culture, and Film" Panel. Popular Culture/American Culture Association National Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana - April 2015.
Wooden Stakes and Canine Teeth; The Battle of the Sexes in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
12 Pages
Demand and Desire in Dracula
“‘Some Longing and at the Same Time Some Deadly Fear’: Victorian Masochism in Dracula.”
2006, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 17(1): 49-59.
17 Pages
Vamping the Woman: Menstrual Pathologies in Bram Stoker's Dracula
8 Pages https://tinyurl.com/ybptww3s
Consuming Appetites and the Modern Vampire
Published 2015
This article looks at food and the role of appetitive consumption in modern representations of the vampire. Most critics have read vampire as embodying Victorian fears surrounding fin-de-siècle desire and sexual decadence. We instead want to shift the discussion to food and eating rituals. Using Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as a bridge text, ―Consuming Appetites and the Modern Vampire‖ compares the British tradition, which advocates disciplined appetites as defense against Dracula's demonic invasion, with modern American texts, which celebrate the vampire as a reflection of its own culture of excess consumption. The vampire is marked as Other precisely by his inability to control his appetite, and the disciplined appetite is essential insofar as it differentiates between the human and vampiric Other. It is this legacy of appetitive excess which continues to inform our modern interpretations of the vampire, whether this figure is a direct inheritor of Dracula or a more sympathetic, even domesticated, vampire.
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