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Five Questions about Dracula Answered

July 16, 2019

Literature, Society

academia, Gothic, popularity, questions, social masses

Let’s do something fun this time. Or rather, let’s combine fun with knowledge and – horror of horrors – the academia. Before you run away from this page, shrieking in horror, hold your breath and wait: I’m planning to take the five most popular questions about Dracula as they appear on Google searches and answer them.

As you probably already know, Google’s autocomplete feature reveals the most common questions about a certain topic as you begin typing. Now, this also reveals some incredible stupidity out there. For instance, if you begin typing “is the moon”, the first results include “is the moon a star”, “is the moon a planet”To be absolutely fair, there might be a legitimate question there., and even – brace yourself – “is the moon made of cheese”.

At this point, I have no idea what I’ll get if I begin typing questions about Dracula, so I’m ready to be surprised myself. Let’s get started!

Questions about Dracula
Five questions about Dracula and vampires you always wanted to ask
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Gothic Immortality in A Christmas Carol

July 2, 2019

Criticism

academia, criticism, Gothic, immortality

Note: the following article on Gothic immortality in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 63-64) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the relevant page on the main website.

(Note: Also take a look at the article on immortality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula)

The complexity of Gothic immortality is apparent in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which arguably still remains an under-analyzed, deceptively simple text. Perhaps due to the rather jovial mood of the story – and certainly of the implied outcome – certain important Gothic devices can pass unnoticed. That is especially true for issues pertaining to temporality, reality, and immortality.

Gothic Immortality in A Christmas Carol
Gothic immortality in A Christmas Carol is about facing that which is beyond representation; death, the ultimate sublime
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Immortality in Dracula: Dialectics of Ambiguity

May 25, 2019

Criticism

academia, criticism, Dracula, Gothic, immortality

Note: the following article on immortality in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 64-67) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

(Note: Also take a look at the article on immortality in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol)

Immortality in Dracula acquires ominous tints. The curse is not only construed as the inability to find peace, but also as the pressing need to attack others for nutrition. The suggestion of a possible reversal of the ageing process appears for the first time in Dracula’s castle, when Jonathan Harker sees the Count in his box “but looking as if his youth had been half renewed” (D 59).

When Jonathan relives the experience on English soil later on, the Count has “grown young” (D 184) – an oxymoron of sorts, as it includes two meanings with conflicting arrows of time.

immortality in dracula
Immortality in Dracula is a matter of understanding precisely what “not to die” entails
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