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Vampire versus the empire: Bram Stoker's reproach of fin-de-siecle Britain in dracula

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dc.contributor.author Koç, Ertuğrul
dc.contributor.author Demir, Yağmur
dc.date.accessioned 2018-10-04T08:34:36Z
dc.date.available 2018-10-04T08:34:36Z
dc.date.issued 2018-06
dc.identifier.citation Koç, E., Demir, Y. (2018). Vampire versus the empire: Bram Stoker's reproach of fin-de-siecle Britain in dracula. Victorian Literature And Culture, 46(2), 425-442. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1017/S1060150317000481 tr_TR
dc.identifier.issn 1060-1503
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12416/1810
dc.description.abstract Much has been said about Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the out-of-tradition exemplar of the Gothic which, perhaps, has had a more pervasive effect on our understanding of life and death, gender roles and identity, and sex and perversity than any other work of the genre. The vampire from the so-called dark ages has become a symbol standing for the uncontrollable powers acting on us and also for all the discarded, uncanny phenomena in human nature and history. The work, however, has usually been taken by the critics of Gothic literature as “a paradigmatic Gothic text” (Brewster 488) representing the social, psychological, and sexual traumas of the late-nineteenth century. Hence, it has been analysed as a work “breaking [the] taboos, [and in need of being] read as an expression of specifically late Victorian concerns” (Punter and Byron 231). The text has also been seen as “reinforc[ing] readers’ suspicions that the authorities (including people, institutions and disciplines) they trust are ineffectual” (Senf 76). Yet, it has hardly ever been taken as offering an alternative Weltanschauung in place of the decaying Victorian ethos. True, Dracula is a fin-de-siècle novel and deals with the turbulent paradigmatic shift from the Victorian to the modern, and Stoker, by creating the lecherous vampire and his band as the doppelgängers of the sexually sterile and morally pretentious bourgeois types (who are, in fact, inclined to lascivious joys), reveals the moral hypocrisy and sexual duplicity of his time. But, it is also true that by juxtaposing the “abnormal” against the “normal” he targets the utilitarian bourgeois ethics of the empire: aware of the Victorian pragmatism on which the concept of the “normal” has been erected, he, with an “abnormal” historical figure (Vlad Drăculea of the House of Drăculești, 1431–76) who appears as Count Dracula in the work, attacks the ethical superstructure of Britain which has already imposed on the Victorians the “pathology of normalcy” (Fromm 356). Hence, Stoker's choice of title character, the sadistic Vlad the Impaler, who fought against the Ottoman Empire in the closing years of the Middle Ages, and his anachronistic rendering of Dracula as a Gothic invader of the Early Middle Ages are not coincidental (Figure 8). In the world of the novel, this embodiment of the early and late paradigms is the antagonistic power arrayed against the supposedly stable, but in reality fluctuating, fin-de-siècle ethos. However, by turning this personification of the “evil” past into a sexual enigma for the band of men who are trying to preserve the Victorian patriarchal hegemony, Stoker suggests that if Victorian sterile faith in the “normal” is defeated through a historically extrinsic (in fact, currently intrinsic) anomaly, a more comprehensive social and ethical epoch that has made peace with the past can be started. tr_TR
dc.language.iso eng tr_TR
dc.publisher Cambridge Univ. Press. tr_TR
dc.relation.isversionof 10.1017/S1060150317000481 tr_TR
dc.rights info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess tr_TR
dc.title Vampire versus the empire: Bram Stoker's reproach of fin-de-siecle Britain in dracula tr_TR
dc.type article tr_TR
dc.relation.journal Victorian Literature And Culture tr_TR
dc.contributor.authorID 6497 tr_TR
dc.contributor.authorID 30410 tr_TR
dc.identifier.volume 46 tr_TR
dc.identifier.issue 2 tr_TR
dc.identifier.startpage 425 tr_TR
dc.identifier.endpage 442 tr_TR
dc.contributor.department Çankaya Üniversitesi, Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi, İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü tr_TR


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