May 19, 2014

Radu Florescu, Romanian Historian and Specialist On Dracula, Dies

Radu Florescu, who with Raymond T. McNally wrote the popular book In Search of Dracula (Mariner Books, 1994), as well as numerous other volumes, has died at the age of 88. Professor Florescu was born in Romania and educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and Indiana University. Dr. Florescu served as head of the East European Research Center, Boston College, for more than two decades, and then retired to France with his wife.

Professor Florescu and his co-author suggest in In Search of Dracula that Bram Stoker modeled the famous vampire on the notorious Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476/77), Prince of Wallachia, called Dracula, who had a particularly awful way of dispatching his enemies (hence his nickname).

Short and very selective bibliography on law and Dracula below (Remember that Jonathan Harker, one of the narrators of the novel, is a young solicitor, and Professor Van Helsing is both a lawyer and a physician). Another link to the full e-text here (Project Gutenberg). Bram Stoker himself studied law later in life, and was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1890. See Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula (Da Capo Press, 2002).

Carpi, Daniela, A Biojuridical Reading of Dracula, 6 Polemos 169 (2012).

Dunleavy, Matthew, Tracing the Criminal Through Modern Myths: Frankenstein's Creature to Dracula, in 32 Conference Proceedings of the Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference, Bishop's University, March 15-16, 2013 (Bishop's University, 2013).

Harse, Katie, "Power of Combination": Dracula and Secret Societies, in Flashes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the War of the Worlds Centennial, Nineteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts 195 (David Ketterer, ed.; Greenwood Press, 2004).

McGillivray, Anne, "He Would Have Made a Wonderful Solicitor": Law, Modernity, and Professionalism in Bram Stoker's Dracula, in Lawyers and Vampires: Cultural Histories of Legal Professions 225 (W. Wesley Pue and David Sugarman (Hart Publishing, 2003).

McGillivray, Anne, "What Sort of Grim Adventure Was It On Which I Had Embarked?": Lawyers, Vampires and the Melancholy of Law, 4 Gothic Studies 116 (2002).

Senf, Carol A., Dracula: The Unseen Face In the Mirror, 9 The Journal of Narrative Technique 160 (1979).

Wasson, R., The Politics of Dracula, in 9 English Literature in Translation 1880-1920 24 (1966).

From the Wall Street Journal: More here on Dracula and a tax lawyer's contribution to an annotated version of the manuscript. (Tax lawyers are everywhere).




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