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  • Stoker & the Gothic
  • Sos Eltis
Catherine Wynne, ed. Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations and Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xiv + 273 pp. $100.00

THIS USEFUL COLLECTION of essays interrogates diverse aspects of Bram Stoker's Gothic fictions, their connection with contemporary ideas and personalities, and their afterlives and echoes in other writers' and artists' works. There is, perhaps inevitably, a concentration on Dracula (1896), but there are also some valuable essays on the wider span of Stoker's work, in particular The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), and his 1893 short story "The Squaw." Like his most famous shape-shifting character, Stoker's imagery remains suggestively open to a host of alternative interpretations. Thus, in this satisfyingly broad mix of essays, Stoker's fiction is read through the lens of colonial, medical, racial, scientific and, above all, sexual concerns. The malleability of the material is highlighted by the conflicting readings offered by some of the essays: Stoker figures racial mixing as infection or as crucial to national health; he is critical of colonial brutality or fearfully obsessed with the obscene threat of female resistance to male colonisation.

Some of the essays are closely factual, exploring the literary and textual hinterland of Stoker's Gothic imaginary. In "On the Origins of the Gothic Novel: From Old Norse to Otranto," Martin Arnold traces the roots of the term "Gothic" and the influence of the study of Old Norse on the emergence of the genre, offering a wealth of reference points in which the potential Gothicism of the material remains, however, rather inaccessible for those unfamiliar with the contents of the works named. Marius-Mircea Crişan analyses Stoker's reading of contemporary travel books and sociological studies of the Carpathians, [End Page 121] Wallachia and Moldavia in "Bram Stoker and Gothic Transylvania," neatly articulating the theatricality and alternative sense of time which characterise Stoker's transformation of his source material to create his Gothic landscape. Katharine Cockin brings her encyclopaedic knowledge of Ellen Terry to bear in "Bram Stoker, Ellen Terry, Pamela Colman Smith and the Art of Devilry," mining letters and journals for fascinatingly dark self-characterisations which offer the actress as a model not only for Mina and Lucy but for the Count himself. Cockin then traces the further influence of Dracula on the work of Coleman Smith, Terry's adopted daughter and the artist responsible for the most famous Tarot card designs. Catherine Wynne similarly travels both forwards and backwards, analysing Stoker's fictional transformation of Whitby from the tourist destination of George du Maurier's Victorian drawings to a sinisterly Gothic destination, and the influence exercised upon Daphne du Maurier's reimagining of her family past and her vision of Cornwall as a similarly haunting location. Stoker's own fictional afterlife is chronicled by William Hughes, astutely noting the tendency of biographers to read the author through the lens of his most famous work, and how this mixture of fact and fiction has been reimagined in recent novels and stories in which Stoker stars as an action hero and an inaccurate chronicler of vampire history.

A number of the essays draw on particular background details to Dracula to offer re-readings of the novel's significance. Richard Storer considers the novel's dedication to Hall Caine as "To my dear friend, Hommy-Beg," subtly tracing the tensions, rivalries and homoerotic currents that ran between the two writers, both on the page and in person. "Friend" is how Dracula addresses Jonathan Harker, and Storer finds a similarly freighted ambivalence in Stoker's affectionate dedication of a novel which can also be read as a riposte to Caine's self-aggrandising and colonising of the marketplace, making him a literary Dracula whose vulgar influence must be challenged by a literary brotherhood. In "'Gay Motes that People the Sunbeams': Dust, Death and Degeneration in Dracula," Victoria Samantha Dawson locates vampires' ability to disperse themselves as mist as a response to the scientific study of the smallest units of matter, and its unsettling potential to break down divisions between animal and human, life and death. Adeptly highlighting the discourses and anxieties that...

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