Abstract
This chapter discusses a group of novels that simultaneously cannibalise both Bram Stoker’s biography and his canonical Gothic novel, Dracula (1897), which itself centres on vampiric cannibalism. The contemporary reworkings of Dracula discussed here, which include Tom Holland’s Supping with Panthers (1996), Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula (2008) and Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula the Un-Dead (2009), appropriate Stoker himself in a refracted version of the vampire story and envision new sources for the original novel (that is, other than the Victorian novelist’s own imagination and research), thereby challenging Stoker’s authorial status. This dual postmodernist cannibalism of the text and the author raises questions about authenticity, authorship, originality and literary influence.
Keywords
Adaptation Dracula Cannibalism Bram stoker Neo-Victorian VictorianReferences
- Arata, Stephen D. ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation’. In Glennis Byron (ed.), Dracula: Contemporary Critical Essays. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999 [1990], pp. 119–144.Google Scholar
- Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- ———. ‘Vampires in the Light’. In Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (eds.), Dracula. By Bram Stoker, 1897. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997 [1995], pp. 389–404.Google Scholar
- Bak, John S. Post/Modern Dracula: From Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.Google Scholar
- Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller; with a note on the text by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.Google Scholar
- Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. London: Phoenix, 1997 [1996].Google Scholar
- Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1973].Google Scholar
- Brewer, David A. The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion Books, 1992.Google Scholar
- Carey, Peter. Jack Maggs. London: Faber & Faber, 1998 [1997].Google Scholar
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed. Henry Nelson. London: Pickering, 1836.Google Scholar
- Farson, Daniel. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. London: Joseph, 1975.Google Scholar
- Flood, Alison. ‘Bram Stoker’s Notebooks Offered Cryptic Clues to Dracula’. Guardian, 18 October 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/18/bram-stoker-notebook-dracula.
- Gaiman, Neil. ‘Introduction’. In The New Annotated Dracula. By Bram Stoker and edited by Leslie S. Klinger. London; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.Google Scholar
- Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by J.E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1997].Google Scholar
- Gutleben, Christian. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2001.Google Scholar
- Holland, Tom. Supping with Panthers. London: Abacus, 2008 [1996].Google Scholar
- Hughes, William. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum, 2009.Google Scholar
- Hughes, William and Andrew Smith. ‘Introduction: Bram Stoker, the Gothic and the Development of Cultural Studies’. In William Hughes and Andrew Smith (eds.), Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Jackson, H.J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
- Jackson, Holbrook. The Anatomy of Bibliomania. London: Faber & Faber, 1930.Google Scholar
- Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Kelly, Stuart. ‘The New Penguin English Library Is a Far Cry from Its 1963 Version’. Guardian, 24 May 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/may/24/new-penguin-english-library-2012.
- Klinger, S. Leslie, ed. The New Annotated Dracula. London; New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.Google Scholar
- Litt, Toby. ‘Aspern Capers’. Guardian, 2 (Nov 2002).Google Scholar
- Luckhurst, Roger. ‘100 Years Ago Today: The Death of Bram Stoker’. OUP Blog, 2012. http://blog.oup.com/2012/04/bram-stoker-death-centenary-dracula/.
- Ludlam, Harry. A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker. London: Fireside Press, 1962.Google Scholar
- Macfarlane, Robert. Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Malchow, Howard L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
- Miller, Elizabeth. ‘Afterword’. In Dracula the Un-Dead. London: Harper, 2009, pp. 391–397.Google Scholar
- Miller, Elizabeth and Dacre Stoker, eds. The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker. London: The Robson Press, 2012.Google Scholar
- Milton, John. Areopagitica. Birmingham: E. Aber, 1868 [1644].Google Scholar
- Murray, Paul. From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker. London: Pimlico, 2005 [2004].Google Scholar
- Punter, David and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.Google Scholar
- Rogers, David. ‘Introduction’. In Dracula. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993, pp. v–xix.Google Scholar
- Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975.Google Scholar
- Savu, Laura E. Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
- Senf, Carol A. Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker’s Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.Google Scholar
- Skal, David J. ‘“His Hour upon the Stage”: Theatrical Adaptations of Dracula’. In Dracula. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 371–381.Google Scholar
- Slater, Michael. ‘“Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes”: Mass Culture and the Re-Enchantment of Modernity, c.1890–c.1940’. The Historical Journal 46:3 (September 2003): pp. 599–622.Google Scholar
- Slights, William W.E. Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001.Google Scholar
- Spencer, Jane. Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon 1660–1830. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1993 [1897]. Google Scholar
- Stoker, Dacre and Ian Holt. Dracula the Un-Dead. London: Harper, 2009.Google Scholar
- Sutherland, John. Curiosities of Literature: A Book Lover’s Anthology of Literary Erudition. London: Arrow, 2008.Google Scholar
- The Original Vampire Diaries. UK: Ivy Press, 2010.Google Scholar
- Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: William Bathoe, 1766 [1764].Google Scholar
- Wolf, Leonard. The Essential Dracula. New York; London: Plume, 1993.Google Scholar