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Bram Stoker: Dracula

This volume, now a standard reference work, is the only comprehensive guide to over 60 years cumulative criticism connected with Dracula. Where most critical studies of Dracula are preoccupied with the text of the novel itself, this volume is entirely concerned with the critical archive: its history, its durable trends and the newest developments. It opens with a consideration of the often-contentious place Dracula has occupied in criticism, and then notes the disputed episodes in the author’s life that have destabilised biographical studies. The five chapters that follow provide histories of, and critical responses to, the major theoretical approaches to Stoker’s writing. The first chapter considers psychoanalysis and its descendants, Freud’s theories being the first to be systematically tried upon the novel, and covers relevant criticism from the time of Ernest Jones and Maurice Richardson to more recent interventions by Joseph Bierman, Elisabeth Bronfen and Jerrold Hogle. The second chapter considers the more recent approaches to Dracula offered by medical history and the material sciences, and notes the cultural importance of blood, infection and death as well as the novel’s incorporation of clinical and popular medicine, from pathology and alienism to masturbation. The historically political deployment of medicine is relevant to the following chapter, which charts how Dracula has functioned in criticism as a narrative capable of expressing a persistent sense of national, imperial and racial unease. This is also directly relevant to the fourth chapter, which considers the often contentious place of Dracula in the canon of Irish studies. The final chapter examines the deployment of Dracula in gender studies, and acknowledges recent work in Queer theory. The afterword considers the rise of the modern scholarly edition, and looks forward to a projected critical future, including the likely association of the novel with ecocriticism.