Dracula critics Flashcards
Arata
Reverse Colonization and the “other”
“By moving Castle Dracula there [the Carpathians], Stoker gives distinctly political overtones to his Gothic narrative. In Stoker’s version of the myth, vampires are intimately linked to military conquest and the rise and fall of empires”
Rob Shepherd
“By moving Castle Dracula there [the Carpathians], Stoker gives distinctly political overtones to his Gothic narrative. In Stoker’s version of the myth, vampires are intimately linked to military conquest and the rise and fall of empires”
By Jennifer Wicke in “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media”
“Lucy’s white westernness becomes totemic in her vamping; the crepuscular universe she inhabits is a twilight of the gods of Western hegemony”
Edward Said
“everything about the Orient […] exuded dangerous sex, threatened hygiene and domestic seemliness with an excessive ‘freedom of intercourse’”
Wicke
“If one considers her name, Luce, light and illumination, emanating out of the West-enra, she is clearly an overdetermined being, more than a woman, a civilizational cause”.
Arata on Morris
“A shadowy figure throughout, Morris is linked with vampires and racial Others from his first appearance”
Arata on Morris and Dracula
“Stoker wants us to consider the American and the Roumanian together” (642), because “Morris [is now] standing outside the window in the place vacated by Dracula, looking in on the assembled Westerners who have narrowly escaped his violence”
Moretti in ‘The Dialect of Fear’
“So long as things go well for Dracula, Morris acts like an accomplice. As soon as there is a reversal of fortunes, he turns into his staunchest enemy”
Leonard Wolf in his essay on Liminality in Dracula
“late nineteenth-century cult of female invalidism… [that culminated] in the notion that a dead woman is more beautiful than a living one”
Kelle Landix
“as an Anglican, Jonathan Harker is reluctant to take the crucifix… this does not affect the efficacy of the object as a weapon against the vampire”
Reviewer in ‘Spectator’ at the time it was published
“The sentimental element is decidedly mawkish … The up-to-dateness of the book - the phonograph diaries, typewriters and so on - hardly fits with the medieval methods which ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula’s foes.”
WL Courtney in a Daily Telegraph
“There are two things which are remarkable in the novel [Dracula] - the first is the confident reliance on superstition as furnishing the ground work of a modern society; and the second, more significant still, is the whole adaptation of the legend to such ordinary spheres of latter-day existence as the harbour of Whitby and Hampstead Heath.”
David Punter ‘The Literature of Terror
(1996)’
Psychoanalytical
Dracula was “one of the most important expressions of the social and psychological dilemmas of the late nineteenth century”
David Punter ‘The Literature of Terror (1996)’
“He blurs the line between man and beast […[ he blurs the line between man and God by daring to partake in immortal life and by practising a corrupt but superhuman form of love; and he blurs the line between man and woman by demonstrating the existence of female passion”
Fred Botting in ‘The Gothic’
“male quest romance” which “feeds off prevailing cultural anxieties concerning corruption, sexuality and spirit”
“an irruption of unavowable energies from the primitive past of human sexuality”
