Introduction
2022 has been busy for scholars of vampire fiction: besides the 125th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu’s influential ‘Carmilla’ (1872), F.W Murnau’s film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), the juvenile Lost Boys (1987) and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) also celebrated their recognition. Appreciation towards these stories has been manifested all year around.
Nevertheless, it was not always easy for Dracula to be so recognisable. When Irish author Bram Stoker (8 November 1847- 20 April 1912) published it in 1897, he was best known as the manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London and as Henry Irving’s personal assistant. Initially called THE UN-DEAD, the readership of the time seemed to prefer Richard Marsh’s The Beetle and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, texts which outsold the soon-to-be popular vampire Dracula.
Image 1: First Edition cloth cover, 1897. British Library.
This collection of essays attempts to bring to the fore some aspects regarding what Chris Baldick ‘has called a modern myth, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde (1886).’[i] As author Patrick McGrath claims, Dracula is ‘a sort of lens, bringing focus and compression to diverse Gothic motifs, including not only vampirism but madness, the night, spoiled innocence, disorder in nature, sacrilege, cannibalism, necrophilia, psychic projection, the succubus, the incubus, the ruin, and the tomb.’[ii] Stoker’s vampire cast such an influential shadow that all types of artists followed his transgressions, each of them reimagining some elements of the storyline in the novel, yet always inspired by the Transylvanian Count who wants to roam the London streets and seduce its women.
Dr Onur Işık analyses the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler, one of the most referenced possible sources for the vampire’s character, and his importance in Turkish history. Focusing on Vlad’s imprisonment in the country, Işık’s paper studies the effects of the incident.
Ph.D. researcher Erdogan Sima’s approach to the novel is a biopolitical one. With the threat of a ‘new order of beings’ the vampiric infection can trigger, Sima argues about the human conceptions of monstrosity and transgressive sexuality through anthropocentric lens.
Postdoctoral research Madeline Potter studies the two types of magic found in Stoker’s novel: the rationalised one versus the enchanted worldview. By researching the clash between the demonic and the natural, Potter reflects upon the materialism and scepticism of the Victorian age.
Independent scholar Victoria Hurtado draws attention to the monstrosity depicted in Stoker’s text with the figure of the vampire and its folkloric and historic origins and marks an introduction of adaptations in the collection by studying Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Independent art historian Julia Biggs examines the influence of Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (c. 1808-10) on Murnau’s abovementioned Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), and its importance as a transformational threshold in its mise-en-scène.
PhD Candidate Tatiana Fajardo analyses Eiko Ishioka’s prominent costume designs for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Through a combination of the West and the East, Ishioka’s detailed outfits help develop the characters’ personalities and origins.
Bibliography
Davison Carol Margaret. 2014. Bram Stoker's Dracula: Sucking through the Century 1897-1997. Toronto: Dundurn.
Luckhurst Roger. 2018. The Cambridge Companion to Dracula. Cambridge United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
[i] Baldick quoted by Roger Luckhurst in The Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’, p.2
[ii] Patrick McGrath in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997, p.47