Dracula Studies

*A long overdue study of the social, political and cultural context of Bram Stoker’s Dracula * A welcome addition to Dracula studies, using British and Romanian sources * A postcolonial look at Dracula * The book argues that Stoker was at least in part inspired by the marriage of Vlad Tepes’ descendant, Mary of Teck, to the future king George V.

The discussion about Bram Stoker's possible contribution to Mörkrets makter, the Swedish version of Dracula, and about the identity of the anonymous Swedish editor/translator, has reached no definitive conclusions yet. This paper addresses a series of minor mysteries linked to the Swedish variants: the possible connections between the Budapest, the Chicago and the Stockholm serialisations; the use of certain names (Draculitz, Mary Wood, Valentini's, Zolyva, Koromeszo); references to the Whitechapel Murders and the Thames Torso Mysteries, among others. Although these observations provide no definitive proof regarding the authorship of Mörkrets makter, taken together, they seem to show subtle support for the idea that these Dracula modifications were created entirely in Sweden.

The identification of deviant burials as those of ‘vampires’ is a feature of excavated skeletons from sites across Eastern, Central and Southern Europe as well as the Balkans. Based on a close reading of historic and folkloric sources researchers have sought to match features of excavated sites with narrative descriptions drawn from vampire legend and myth. This study critically reviews the recent claims based on sites in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. Whilst it is found that there was a widespread belief in vampires across Europe, it is argued that it is difficult to make absolute claims for ‘vampire’ burials on archaeological grounds as in most cases there are alternate and equally compelling interpretations of the data.

KEYWORDS
ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, SIXTEENTH CENTURY, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, VAMPIRE, DEVIANT BURIAL, PLAGUE, BLACK DEATH, FOLKLORE, PAGAN, BURIAL, WITCH, BALKANS, EASTERN EUROPE, CENTRAL EUROPE, SOUTHERN EUROPE, BULGARIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, POLAND, GREECE, ITALY, SLOVAKIA, LESBOS, VENICE, APOTROPAIC, VAMPIRIDZHIJA, PERPERIKON, SOZOPOL, PROSTEJOV, CELAKOVICE, DRAWSKO, GLIWICI, SOUTHWELL, KILTEASHEEN, LAZZARETTO NUOVO, NACHTZEHRER, KAMIEN POMORSKI

In this comparative study of Angela Carter's " The Lady of the House of Love " (1979) and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979) eating habits, relation to the domestic and to (ir)rationality are examined in the female and male characters in both works to show how their authors create gender hybridity. Drawing upon Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), the article proposes that the hybridity reproduces patriarchal transfer of power.

En el presente trabajo se van a estudiar  la figura del vampiro en la literatura previa a la obra de Bram Stoker, Drácula. Posteriormente, se hará una comparación entre la obra culmen de la literatura vampírica y su adaptación teatral, llevada a cabo por Hamilton Deane, de donde Tod Browning partiría para llevar la obra al cine en 1931.

From the preface of this E-book(53 pages A4, c. 24.500 words):
"This text is largely based on my manuscript “Professor Abraham van Helsing: A Psychiatrist from Amsterdam? Hypnotism, Telepathy, Spiritualism and Magic in the Victorian Age.” The first version was published through Moonlake Editions on July 18, 2012. Version 2 was published on July 26, 2012. Tickled by repeated remarks by the film maker Tonny van Rentherghem that his grandfather, the Amsterdam psychiatrist and hypnotist Albert van Renterghem, would have been the role model for Stoker’s Professor Van Helsing,1 I tried to chart the possible connections between Albert van Renterghem and Bram Stoker, either directly or indirectly, through intermediaries such as Frederik van Eeden, William Heinemann, Edmund Gosse, W.F.H. Myers, William James, Charles Lloyd Tuckey, Sir Richard Francis Burton, etc.
In 2016, I made a similar attempt to discover the possible links between Bram Stoker and Valdimar Ásmundsson, the publisher of the Icelandic version of Dracula: a 70-page dossier entitled “Weighing The Odds – Stoker’s Contribution to Makt Myrkranna.” Although in both instances, definitive proof of a nexus eluded me, some of this material may serve here to portray how interconnected London’s intellectual, literary and artistic circles of the 1890s were, especially when it came to their interest in esoteric phenomena."

File: HansCDeRoos Bram Stokers Hidden World v1 31Dec21.pdf

There is a common misconception that the early critical reception of Bram Stoker’s famed vampire novel, Dracula (1897), was “mixed.” This reference book, as the present introduction lays out, sets out to dispel this myth en force by offering the most exhaustive collection of early critical responses to Stoker’s novel ever assembled, including some 91 reviews and reactions as well as 36 different press notices, many of which have not been seen in print since they appeared over 100 years ago. What these early critical responses reveal about Dracula’s writing is that it was predominantly seen by early reviewers and responders to parallel, even supersede the Gothic horror works of such canonical writers as Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, and Edgar Allan Poe.

This paper analyses Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula as a literary document which reflects important scientific and technological developments of the fin-the-siècle era, ranging from blood transfusion and virology via psychotherapy and psychoanalysis up to brain research and communication technology. These developments not only herald a new style of scientific thinking, but also foreshadow a number of developments still relevant for contemporary culture. In other words, I read Dracula as a window into biomedical and bio-political challenges surfacing in the 1890s, but evolving into major research areas. Rather than seeing science and literature as separate cultures, moreover, Dracula as a case study reveals how techno-scientific and literary developments mutually challenge and mirror one another, so that we may use Stoker’s novel to deepen our understanding of contemporary science-related developments and vice versa. Dracula provides a window into fin-de-siècle research practices, collating various disciplines (haematology, virology, psychotherapy, neurology) into a genealogic Gesamtbild. Thus, Stoker’s novel elucidates the techno-scientific and socio-cultural constellation into which psychoanalysis was born. The common epistemic profile of this maieutic backdrop, I will argue, is that both psychoanalysis and Dracula reflect a triumph of the symbolic over the imaginary as a techno-scientific strategy for coming to terms with the threatening real.

O presente artigo tem como objetivo traçar uma breve arqueologia das incursões do personagem “Drácula”, criado por Bram Stoker, no livro de 1897 do mesmo nome, no cinema. Embora a obra de Stoker seja um grande marco da literatura gótica inglesa (e talvez até da literatura de uma forma geral), é no audiovisual que percebemos um maior desenvolvimento do vampiro, alcançando uma fama inimaginável. Nesse caso, vemos que a influência dos meios acabam sendo um interessante modelador no desenvolvimento do vampiro ao longo do tempo. Sua diferença de suporte midiático e diferentes momentos
da sociedade e das possibilidades tecnológicas acabam nos apresentando uma incrível variação do produto literário inicial. Percebemos que falar de Drácula nunca é um assunto esgotável, pois, a cada ano, uma nova investida audiovisual surge para nos revelar novas possibilidades a respeito desse ser tão camaleônico. Assim, iremos mergulhar nas inúmeras aparições do vampiro no cinema, percebendo como esse ser foi se transformando com o passar dos anos e como, ao passar do papel para a película, ele alcança sua plenitude como um
ser imortal.

Using (and to some extent, “abusing”) Jacques Derrida’s concept of “decontextualisation”
(and “recontextualisation”), the broadest interest of my paper is the deliberate (and critical)
decontextualisation of stereotypes through literature. My study particularly focuses here on a fictional
strategy I will call “literary deflection”, i.e. the intentionally distorted reflection – having critical
deconstruction as its main intent – of a cultural stereotype. As a hands-on illustration of this fictional
policy, I have chosen Alexandru Mușina’s take on the profile of the vampire in his last novel Nepotul
lui Dracula [Dracula’s Nephew] (2012). Starting from a thorough observation of the hilarious
(ironical) “misuse” of the original romantic stereotype of the vampire in Mușina’s story, this
approach will eventually reveal the essentially ethical nature of such implied cultural identity
(re)negotiation and the pertinence of fictional discourse as an instrument for cultural analysis.

Michaela Wünsch "Von Vampiren und anderen Degenerierten. Dracula im Kontext moderner Entartungsdiskurse", in: Julia Bertschick/Christa Tuczay (Hg.): Poetische Wiedergänger. Deutschsprachige Vampirismus-Diskurse vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Tübingen: Francke-Verlag 2005, S. 217-233. Michaela Wünsch, Von Vampiren und anderen Degenerierten. Dracula im Kontext moderner Entartungsdiskurse. "Wie Fledermäuse in alten Thürmen so hausen sie im stolzen Bau der von ihnen fertig vorgefundenen Gesittung." 1 Die Rede ist von den ‚Entarteten' des Fin de Siècle, vor denen Max Nordau ähnlich eindringlich warnte, wie Bram Stoker vor dem fremden Eindringling aus dem Osten in dem Vampirroman Dracula. Das Bild des ‚Entarteten' als parasitärem ‚Schmarotzer' gleicht nicht nur dem blutsaugenden Grafen, sondern auch zeitgenössischen antisemitischen Stereotypen. Wie sich an Stokers Dracula insbesondere deutschsprachige Diskurse um ‚Entartung' und Antisemitismus ablesen lassen, soll auf den folgenden Seiten gezeigt werden.

From the introduction:
"Almost five years after the Swedish texts were brought to the attention of international academic circles and fans of Gothic fiction, content and style of Mörkrets Makter have hardly been analyzed in their own right.
This essay focuses on themes recurring throughout the Swedish story, some of them without having an identical counterpart in Dracula. Although some of these issues were already touched upon in other essays, this is the first time that they are explored in conjunction with extensive quotations from the Swedish text, translated to English. Together with my book Dracula: The Swedish Drawings (1899-1900) and my article about the “Mini-Mysteries,” as well as my previous publications about Anders Albert Anderson-Edenberg and the memoirs of Bernhard Wadström, it forms the most complete overview of the Swedish Dracula variants until a full-length translation becomes available."

File: HansCDeRoos Trends in MöMa v1 31Dec21

The discussion about Bram Stoker’s possible contribution to Morkrets makter, the Swedish version of Dracula, and about the identity of the anonymous Swedish editor/translator, has reached no definitive conclusions yet. This paper addresses a series of minor mysteries linked to the Swedish variants: the possible connections between the Budapest, the Chicago and the Stockholm serialisations; the use of certain names (Draculitz, Mary Wood, Valentini’s, Zolyva, Koromeszo); references to the Whitechapel Murders and the Thames Torso Mysteries, among others. Although these observations provide no definitive proof regarding the authorship of Mörkrets makter, taken together, they seem to show subtle support for the idea that these Dracula modifications were created entirely in Sweden.

The curse of God pronounced on your sex weighs still on the world. Guilty you must bear its hardships. You are the devil's gateway, you desecrated the fatal tree, you first betrayed the Law of God, you softened up with your cajoling words the man against whom the devil could ...

The construction of European identity, as Iver B. Neumann (1999) suggests, was strongly linked to the threat of the Ottoman Turk who was commonly referred as the “barbarians” by European Christians. In fact, from the late-eighteenth century onwards the Ottoman Turks were used widely in Western texts alongside Gothic motifs which associated the Ottoman Empire with barbarism. Accordingly, Bram Stoker’s iconic vampire in Dracula (1897) is often read as an Eastern savage or a barbarian through which Britain, or more broadly Christian Europe, defines its own civilized status. Jonathan Harker’s travels “among the traditions of the Turkish rule” is depicted as the journey to the unknown, to the land of superstition and barbaric practices. A number of post-9/11 Dracula narratives continue to use the stereotypical image of “the barbarian Turk” as a justification for Dracula’s vampirism. Drawing on Maria Boletsi’s understanding of barbarism and Johan Höglund’s reconsideration of Patrick Brantlinger’s concept of imperial Gothic in the context of post-9/11 American politics and culture, this article explores how Dracula narratives repeatedly evoke the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism as a crucial tool of Western self-definition in different political atmospheres.

O presente artigo tem como objetivo uma análise geral do século XIX como momento de mudanças que acabariam por ser definitivas e definidoras da sociedade atual, que a partir da revolução dual, Industrial e Francesa, seria indissolúvel. Foi utilizado como fonte principal do período os estudos aprofundados pelo historiador Eric Hobsbawm. Traz uma reflexão sobre o absurdo que parece a crença em algo sobrenatural numa era científica, ao mesmo tempo que nos mostra a determinação das personagens em eliminar aquilo que parece absurdo em função do bem e do instinto maior: salvar vidas. Aponta brevemente também alguns conceitos e ideias relacionados a mitos e culturas, permeados pelos estudos antropológicos realizados por Claude Lévi-Strauss. Por fim, apresenta uma análise da sociedade oitocentista finissecular sob um ponto de vista que permeia as experiências pessoais do escritor como homem e estrangeiro, a partir da obra Drácula de Bram Stoker, utilizando a mesma como fonte.