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Dracula and Detection: Among Genres II

John Wilson Foster

in Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction

This chapter begins with a discussion of Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Man. It then discusses the work of Elliot O'Donnell, including Werewolves. It then analyzes detective fiction.

Cults, Independents and ‘Guerrilla’ Filmmaking

Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich, and Sharon Monteith

in Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader

This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and ... More

This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and specialised forms of institutional support that emerged for independent film. The video market, in particular, became a crucial source of funding through cassette presales. At the same time, international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, London, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong and Pusan became an important showcase for raising public awareness of films produced outside Hollywood. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Gone With The Wind Plus Fangs’: Genre, Taste and Distinction in the Assembly, Marketing and Reception of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Thomas Austin, which examines the particular means by which film in the early 1990s was distinguished by a so-called ‘industrially motivated hybridity’. This describes the means by which film creates appeal not through any singular or unified style, but through promotional and conversational processes of fragmentation, elaboration and diffusion.Less

Making A Case: Vampirism, Sexuality, and Interpretation

Mighall Robert

in A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares

This chapter explores the convergences and divergences of fictional and medico-legal discourse in Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period by focusing on the figure of the vampire. ... More

This chapter explores the convergences and divergences of fictional and medico-legal discourse in Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period by focusing on the figure of the vampire. It explains how the vampire played an important role in the definition of the category of the sadist, aided writers in their portrayal of sexuality, and helped science to explain moral monstrosity. It contends that Bram Stoker's Dracula provided the best example of Gothic fiction's departure from the aims and procedures of psychiatric discourse.Less

THE RECORDED VOICE FROM VICTORIAN AURA TO MODERNIST ECHO

John M. Picker

in Victorian Soundscapes

This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph ... More

This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activities of Thomas Edison's London agent George Gouraud, who arranged for recordings to be made of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, as well as in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Voice of Science” and “The Japanned Box”, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The phonograph, with the power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. Through its mechanical reproduction of voice, it offered forms of control and interaction that late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns later did, but in a period of diminishing mastery over empire and the self, individualized, reassuring, and even desirable.Less

The blood is the life: Bram Stoker's infected capital

in Labyrinths of Deceit: Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Bram Stoker's Dracula focuses on an undead vampire count from Transylvania who effectively invades fin de siècle London. Seward's asylum in London occupies much of the central space of the novel, and ... More

Bram Stoker's Dracula focuses on an undead vampire count from Transylvania who effectively invades fin de siècle London. Seward's asylum in London occupies much of the central space of the novel, and its proximity to the chapel suggests a tension between religion and science. Addiction is mirrored by Dracula's compulsive need to consume human blood on a regular basis in order to maintain his spectral existence. There are numerous references to narcotics in the novel, such as when Van Helsing administers a ‘hypodermic injection of morphia’ to the increasingly vampirised Lucy Westenra to balance her escalating needs for addictive blood transfusions. That the vampire inhabits a fragmented nation such as Transylvania brings up the issue of European identity. Dracula also explores other issues such as the morphine debate, nymphomania, and modernity.Less

Finding a Via Media: Bram Stoker and Mediation

Alison Milbank

in God & the Gothic: Religion, Romance, & Reality in the English Literary Tradition

The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoker can be shown to be seeking a mediation between Catholic and Protestant, and Irish and English, with ... More

The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoker can be shown to be seeking a mediation between Catholic and Protestant, and Irish and English, with The Snake’s Pass an allegory of this proto-ecumenism. The influence of the Anglican idea of the via media, central to Victorian theology, is traced in his work, and compared with the influence of Walt Whitman’s model of comradeship and nation. In particular, F. D. Maurice’s inclusive ecclesiology is at work in Dracula, where the vampire acts as an Antichrist whose economy of substitutionary sacrifice is opposed by a union of Protestant word (diaries, typing) and Catholic sacramentals (Eucharistic host, etc.) and acts of mutual self-sacrifice and reciprocity such as the blood-transfusions. Maurice’s questioning of eternal damnation and Gladstone’s idea of immortal life as a gift are also important in a novel that aims to redeem even Dracula himself.Less

I Want To Suck Your …: Fluids and Fluidity in Dracula Porn

Laura Helen Marks

in Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic

This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of ... More

This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of Dracula, porn adaptations of the novel must carefully navigate gender and sexuality. These adaptations reveal how hardcore film as a whole operates on anxious ground similar to that of Stoker’s novel, simultaneously invoking and resisting sexual anxieties concerning gendered penetration, gendered fluids, and consumption. Dracula, as a culture text, mobilizes queered, gendered, and raced reformulations of consumer and consumed, queering ostensibly straight pornographies, destabilizing supposedly rigid gender dynamics, and resituating the colonial Other. Dracula adaptations invoke and redeploy the racialized implications of nineteenth-century vampirism, channeling racial and sexual subjectivity through vampirism. Dracula penetrates a supposedly sanctified pornotopia, enabling diverse and perverse sexual representations that are instructive in understanding pornography as erotically engaged with sexual fluidity, genre instability, and oscillating power dynamics.Less

The Shipping Intelligence: Shipwrecks and Secret Tears from Dickens to Stoker

Matthew Rubery

in The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News

Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this ... More

Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd's List to highlight the impact news could have on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones. We know this through a remarkable sequence of parallel scenes across the 19th-century novel in which the revelation of private love takes place at the moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine's admiration will be shared by all of England. Novelists as different as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Yonge all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. Such scenes vividly illustrate a new approach to understanding catastrophe in Victorian fiction.Less

‘Nineteenth century (up-to-date) with a vengeance’: vampirism, Victorianism and collage in Guy Maddin’s Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

Dorothea Schuller

in Monstrous media/spectral subjects: Imaging gothic fictions from the nineteenth century to the present

This chapter discusses one of the most recent and – despite the absence of dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Guy Maddin's ... More

This chapter discusses one of the most recent and – despite the absence of dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Guy Maddin's 2002 film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's dance adaptation, set to the music of Gustav Mahler, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin's Diary. Maddin's ‘Victorian’ interpretation of Dracula is marked by an emphasis on the turn-of-the-century cultural contexts of the novel (gender, medicine, race, imperialism). The film presents 1890s England as seen through the eyes of a knowledgeable 21st century viewer whose close reading of the source text is shaped by critical discussions of the novel and the Dracula myth in popular culture. Vampirizing various cultural artifacts from Caligari to Coppola, Maddin's palimpsestic film ultimately manages to be both highly original and collage, both – in the words of Jonathan Harker's diary – ‘up-to-date’ and ‘nineteenth century […] with a vengeance’.Less

The Zoophagous Maniac: Madness and Degeneracy in Dracula

in ‘The Most Dreadful Visitation’: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction

This chapter discusses how notions of degeneration enter into that most potent of late nineteenth-century myths, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It examines what conception of insanity informs Stoker's ... More

This chapter discusses how notions of degeneration enter into that most potent of late nineteenth-century myths, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It examines what conception of insanity informs Stoker's writing, what part it plays in the novel as a whole, and how it relates to the novel's ideas about masculinity. In so doing, it focuses on the complex interplay of realism and fantasy, and with the progressive dissolution of the demarcation between sanity and madness.Less

The Bat and the Beetle

Tim Youngs

in Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the fin de siecle

This chapter examines Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, both from 1897. It reads them both as examples of reverse colonisation and draws a connection betwen the titular ... More

This chapter examines Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, both from 1897. It reads them both as examples of reverse colonisation and draws a connection betwen the titular characters’ shape-changing and the multiple narratives of the texts. The critical roles played by money and animality reflect anxieties about social, physical and moral identities.Less

“Shadows of the Coming Race”

Patrick Brantlinger

in Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians

This chapter surveys the rise of science fiction and the Victorians' response both to what evolution meant for the future and to new machines, especially new communications devices such as the ... More

This chapter surveys the rise of science fiction and the Victorians' response both to what evolution meant for the future and to new machines, especially new communications devices such as the telegraph and the typewriter. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's science fiction classic The Coming Race appeared in 1872. Victorians, including George Eliot, speculated about machines as a super-race that would one day replace humans. In the machinic throes of vampirism, Bram Stoker's Dracula represents a past in which imperialism and cannibalism were inseparable—a past that he threatens to turn into Britain's future by creating an ever-expanding race of vampires. Universal bloodthirstiness or vampiric cannibalism is the ultimate nightmare version of racial degeneration and also of going native.Less

Bringing the undead to life

Cristina Massaccesi

in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

This chapter details the production of Nosferatu (1922). In line with the preferred working pattern of Weimar cinema that placed at its centre the so-called ‘director-unit’ — a system whereby each ... More

This chapter details the production of Nosferatu (1922). In line with the preferred working pattern of Weimar cinema that placed at its centre the so-called ‘director-unit’ — a system whereby each film was the product of a closely knit collaboration of director, screenwriter, set designer, and cameraman — Nosferatu can be regarded not just as the product of the artistic genius of F. W. Murnau but also as the brainchild of at least three other men: the producer and set designer Albin Grau, the screenwriter Henrik Galeen, and, although to a somewhat lesser extent, the cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner. The chapter studies their personalities and careers. It then looks at the film's reception and the following controversy and legal action against Prana Film for the illegal use of intellectual property. Finally, the chapter assesses how similar Nosferatu really was to its literary source, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).Less

Atavism: A Darwinian Nightmare

Mighall Robert

in A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares

This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of ... More

This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of historical time encouraged the emergence of a new breed of Gothic fiction which betrayed a distinct biological and anthropological cast. The chapter explains how the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker provided new locations for the unwelcome past to survive into and threaten the civilized present.Less

A British Princess: Ellen Terry as Imogen

Sophie Duncan

in Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle

This chapter examines Ellen Terry’s performance as Imogen (Cymbeline) at the Lyceum in 1896. It reveals Terry’s performance as Imogen as profoundly implicated in the genesis of Gothic texts including ... More

This chapter examines Ellen Terry’s performance as Imogen (Cymbeline) at the Lyceum in 1896. It reveals Terry’s performance as Imogen as profoundly implicated in the genesis of Gothic texts including Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Using Terry’s interpretation and reception to explore fin-de-siècle views of wifely sexuality, the young bride emerges as a particularly sexualized, little-studied figure in Victorian performance. Actresses negotiated marriage on and offstage, placing their lives, cultural profile, and roles in highly charged conversation. In particular, Terry’s performance as the married princess Imogen contributed to ideas of national character, queenship, and empire as Queen Victoria became Britain’s longest-reigning monarch on the day Terry’s reviews of Imogen were published.Less

Fin de Siècle: Vortex of the Genres

James H. Murphy

in Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age

The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture ... More

The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture movements such as naturalism, decadence, and early modernism, vied with popular forms such as detective fiction, the imperial adventure, and science fiction. Authors like B. M. Croker wrote novels of life in India, while Robert Cromie was prominent in science-fiction and future-war fantasies. In Ireland groupings of writers wrote for differing audiences. Ulster fiction began to emerge in the north with Shan F. Bullock and others. Meanwhile, in the south, Anglo-Irish novelists like Somerville and Ross took to comedy and satire, while Catholic-intelligentsia writers began to scrutinize a changed society. Some novels explored the possibilities of the renewal of society while others interrogated the newer sets of relationships that were possible across traditional class lines and the great landlord–tenant divide, now that the latter was in the process of dissolving.Less

Seerman: the rise of the psychic detective

Neil Cornwell

in Odoevsky's Four Pathways into Modern Fiction: A Comparative Study

This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed ... More

This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed as a proto-‘psychic doctor’. The discussion considers examples of such a figure, in Anglo-Irish and English literature up to the Edwardian era. It assesses works by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood and, again, Hodgson. Such a protagonist is then seen to recede, in the main into a more parodic treatment. A concluding section notes the reappearance at least of such motifs in recent ‘metaphysical detective’ fiction.Less