A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

Over the past decade Gothic criticism has arguably proved as responsive to innovation in the theory of colonial and postcolonial fictions as it was to developments in literary psychoanalysis some forty years earlier. The rise of a postcolonial discourse within the field, though, in a sense makes problematic the boundaries and definitions which demarcate what it is to be textually, discursively Gothic, and also highlights the temporal considerations which fracture as well as unify the integrity of the genre. For critics applying psychoanalysis to the Gothic in the 1960s, the situation was relatively uncomplicated: for Maurice Richardson, writing in 1959 for example, the psychoanalysable Gothic was Bram Stoker’s Dracula , published in 1897, not Richard Matheson’s equally vampiric novel I Am Legend , published five years earlier in 1954. 1 Dracula , a non-contemporary artefact, essentially encodes a pattern of neurosis and repression which, because of its labyrinthine oppressiveness and sheer difference, functions in its own right as an effectively Gothic signifier, an intrusion of the repressive, guilty past into the enlightened, all-seeing present.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.