« Michael Palin's Guides to Everything | Main | Another Amazing Compendium of Books »
September 4, 2005
For Only the Most Inveterately Irish
Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood" Weird study of Dracula.
Sample:
from Dracula's Crypt:"The Metrocolonial Vampire"
Joseph ValenteA founding insight of the Irish Dracula school of criticism has been that Harker's observations in Transylvania refer in whole or in part to the features of life in Ireland in the nineteenth century.3 I think it would be more accurate to say that Harker's observations in Transylvania seem intended to echo or recall prominent treatises, received wisdom, and well-worn remarks, not to mention canards about Ireland. His comment on the immodesty of a peasant woman's native dress, for example, rehearses Edmund Spenser's strictures on Irish women's attire in A View of the Present State of Ireland.4 Harker's complaint about dilatory trains and his comments on the "idolatrous" peasants kneeling by a roadside shrine in a "self-surrender of devotion" (11), like figures "in old missals" (15), would have been familiar enough from Anglocentric travel narratives about Ireland. So too would have been his sense of the general depopulation of the countryside.
Posted by Steven Riddle at September 4, 2005 11:53 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.stblogs.org/scgi-bin/mv/mt-tb.cgi/16137