scholarly journals Dracula – Hybridity and Metafiction

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Anca Andriescu Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Clear Definition ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Place Of Origin ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Good And Evil

AbstractDue to his supernatural nature, but also to his place of origin, Bram Stoker’s well-known character, Dracula, is the embodiment of Otherness. He is an image of an alterity that refuses a clear definition and a strict geographical or ontological placement and thus becomes terrifying. This refusal has determined critics from across the spectrum to place the novel in various categories from a psychoanalytical novel to a Gothic one, from a class novel to a postcolonial one, yet the discussion is far from being over. My article aims to examine this multitude of interpretations and investigate their possible convergence. It will also explore the ambivalence or even plurivalence of the character who is situated between the limit of life and death, myth and reality, historical character and demon, stereotype and fear of Otherness and attraction to the intriguing stranger, colonized and colonizer, sensationalism and palpable fin-de-siècle desperation, victim and victimizer, host and parasite, etc. In addition, it will investigate the mythical perspective that results from the confrontation between good and evil, which can be interpreted not only in the postcolonial terms mentioned above, but also in terms of the metatextual narrative technique, which converts into a meditation on how history and myth interact. Finally, it will demonstrate that, instead of being a representation of history, Bram Stoker’s novel represents a masterpiece of intergeneric hybridity that combines, among others, elements of history, myth, folktale and historical novel.1

VAMPIRE VERSUS THE EMPIRE: BRAM STOKER'S REPROACH OF FIN-DE-SIÈCLE BRITAIN IN DRACULA

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-442
Author(s):  
Ertuğrul Koç ◽  
Yağmur Demir
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Moral Hypocrisy ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fin De Siècle

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.

scholarly journals “Un estado de la conciencia contemporánea”: género y moral en La sirena negra de Emilia Pardo Bazán

Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Bardavío Estevan
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazan ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazán ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics

AbstractDespite Emilia Pardo Bazán’s prominent feminism, La sirena negra has been strangely overlooked by gender studies. When the novel was published in 1908, Gómez de Baquero judged it “non feminist” due to its superficial heroines and the centrality of its complex masculine characters. Academic studies of La sirena negra have not refuted this idea, since they have elided gender approaches to focus on its decadent aesthetics. This article argues, on the contrary, that the novel’s androcentrism can be read as a Pardo Bazan’s strategy to appropriate the patriarchal discourse and hold it responsible for national degeneration. Emilia Pardo Bazán was harshly affected by the fin-de-siècle crisis. In her opinion, Spanish decay came from a lack of solid morality. Thus, Catholic principles should be restored because they would provide the autoregulation mechanisms to regenerate and reassemble the country. Literature should show the new reality, and the French roman psychologique provided her with an appropriate model. La sirena negra sets out the problem of the moral anomie through its protagonist, Gaspar de Montenegro. The analysis of his sexuality and gender performance reveals the danger of this amoral behavior for the degeneration of society, attributed ultimately to the patriarchal order and the androcentric discourse.

‘In that Egyptian den’: situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ailise Bulfin
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

This chapter analyses the relationship between Marsh’s bestselling novel of Egyptian malevolence, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), and a subgenre of Gothic Egyptian fiction which developed partially in response to contentious Anglo-Egyptian political relations. Marsh began writing his novel in 1895, the same year General Herbert Kitchener launched his famous and ultimately successful campaign to quell Islamic-nationalist rebellion in northern Sudan, then indirectly under Anglo-Egyptian control. This chapter exposes the links between the novel and colonial politics, placing The Beetle within the context of Anglo-Egyptian and Sudanese conflict, rather than broadly reading it against general imperial concerns. The chapter provides a fuller picture of both the remarkable revival of the Gothic literary mode at the fin de siècle and the society in which this literary phenomenon occurred. The chapter also reveals how Marsh’s text dramatically exceeded Gothic Egyptian genre conventions in its emphasis on pagan as well as colonial monstrosity.

Unfähigkeit

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Welge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Provincial City ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
French Novel ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Novel

AbstractThe employee as a typical figure of modernity has been represented as a specific type of literary anti-hero since the nineteenth century. Italo Svevo’s early novel, Una vita (1982, A Life), is an example that is strongly related to the theme of the anti-hero in the French novel of disillusion, as well as to the fin-de-siécle concern with an incapacitated, dilettante protagonist, unable to act and live. In light of Svevo’s own misgivings about the profession of writing fiction, the novel reflects on the relation between literature and life, by way of an uprooted individual who finds himself ill at ease in the anonymous, competitive world of modernity. The subject of Svevo’s novel, the arrival of a provincial, petit-bourgeois intellectual to a semi-provincial city, may also be found in a somewhat later Brazilian novel, O amanuense Belmiro (The amanuensis Belmiro, 1937) by Cyro dos Anjos. Aside from parallels of plot, social, and geographical setting, which are grounded in the experience of modernity in different contexts, the two novels may be said to model a new kind of author-function, as well as a specific form of a non-linear, self-reflexive novel.

scholarly journals Portugal's First Queer Novel: Rediscovering Visconde de Vila-Moura's Nova Safo (1912)

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna M. Klobucka
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Marginal Status

This study seeks to recover the novel Nova Safo (1912) by Visconde de Vila-Moura from the marginal status to which it has been consigned in Portuguese literary history by arguing for its momentous cultural relevance as Portugal’s first queer novel. Given the extremely limited number and scope of existing critical approaches to the text, my reading is oriented by a reparative strategy that aims, first and foremost, to remedy its precarious status as an archival object. I describe the novel's inchoate and cluttered collection of references, images, and storylines as a countercultural scrapbook of queer feeling, ruled by an antiquarian sensibility, whose structures of cohesion belong less to the realm of formal aesthetics than to the sphere of homophilic affective epistemology. Further, I chart Nova Safo's intersecting gestures of transitive embodiment—transnational, transgender, and transracial—by discussing the novel’s mournful evocation of three recently departed icons of fin-de-siècle literary culture: Oscar Wilde, Renée Vivien, and João da Cruz e Sousa.

scholarly journals Restoration of the Self through History and Myth in Lina Kostenko’s “Marusia Churai”

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-45
Author(s):  
Myroslava Tomorug-Znaienko
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Unique Individual

The paper analyzes Lina Kostenko’s historical novel in verse portraying the life of the 17th century  Ukrainian minstrel poet Marusia Churai, condemned to death for poisoning her faithless lover. This work, which grows out of Kostenko’s individualized mythical perception of Marusia Churai legend, represents a unique individual construct in which the heroines’ quest for self-realization is kept in tune with the same yearning of the poetess herself; the author’s attitude towards the myth resembles the heroine’s relations with history. The narrative mode of the novel functions mainly in three aspects; these are the heroine’s confrontation with the carnivalized reality of her trial; her subjective journey inward, into the  ruined self, when her execution was pending; and her objective pilgrimage outward, into the history of her ruined land, after getting pardon. The paper touches upon various aspects of the heroine’s perception of history. The main character is depicted as a witness of contemporary events and a bearer of the Word who keeps harmony with the sacred truth of the past. The Hetman’s ‘pardon’ allows Marusia to move freely through history in order to achieve a deeper understanding of her ruined land and seize its spirit. In the experience of the heroine the historical reality appears as versatile and polyphonic, at the same time remaining integral and inseparable from her personality. Kostenko asserts the rights of poets to create their own epochs, to recreate the past or present from within their own mythical experience, becoming thus not only myth-bearers but also mythmakers.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar Wilde
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
East End

‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay. Ever since its first publication in 1890 Wilde's only novel has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. Combining elements of the supernatural, aestheticism, and the Gothic, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an unclassifiable and uniquely unsettling work of fiction.

‘Powers of Their Own Which Mere “Modernity” Cannot Kill’: The Doppelgänger and Temporal Modernist Terror in Dracula

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-76
Author(s):  
Whitney S. May
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Many ◽  
Social Upheaval

Of the many haunting figures that Gothic fiction invokes, none so perfectly encapsulates the mode itself, in all its fantastic incursions of opposing forces and clashing sensibilities, as the doppelgänger. Indeed, this figure in Gothic literature helps to push the bounds of subjective tension so central to the genre. This article examines Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as an entry into the canon of doppelgänger fiction by complicating traditional readings of the central relationship between Count Dracula and Jonathan Harker. By revisiting the novel within the framework of a doppelgänger narrative, this article suggests that part of the real terror for Stoker's fin-de-siècle audience lies in the novel's timing. Located in the gap between the retreating Romantic and advancing high modern epochs, the novel dramatizes the apprehensions of a culture experiencing enormous technological and social upheaval. Specifically, it offers in its doubled pair a means to navigate those anxieties.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document