Dracula In Court @bucketorange

By Sarah Lynch, for Bucket Orange Magazine, a discussion of possible crimes Dracula could be charged with under Australian law. They include stalking and false imprisonment. But he's so charming...

The Toothsome Delights of Vampires

The Telegraph discusses a new edition of Christopher Frayling's landmark Vampyres, and notes that the belief in vampires has been with us for centuries.  The idea that the undead walk among us, and mean to do us harm dates from at least the Middle Ages, and authors have remade and transformed these very real fears into metaphors for all kinds of culture shock. Get me some hot chocolate, a nice blanket, flickering light from a fire, and a good thunderstorm. I'm ready for the next adaption of Dracula.

From Dracula To Blade Runner

Sarah Marshall discusses the history and influence of Bram Stoker's Dracula here for Lapham's Quarterly.   Ms. Marshall compares the Dracula story and the immigrant narrative, but I think it also prefigures the alien invasion narrative, in which the invader takes on the coloration and the habits of the locals and blends in so successfully that they believe they cannot defeat him.

After his emigration on the doomed Demeter, Dracula terrorizes the novel’s narrators not just by his predation of their women, but by his mastery of English accent and mannerisms, and his accrual of English property. Yet he has made this desire for complete absorption into English life clear from the beginning: in one of the book’s most telling and oddly poignant moments, Jonathan Harker enters Dracula’s study and finds him “lying on the sofa, reading, of all things in the world, and English Bradshaw’s Guide”—a railway timetable.

Dracula’s obsession with mastering even the most inconsequential habits of English life, and his almost solicitous insistence on his own incompetence as a counterfeit Englishman, tinges his villainy with something both more complicated and more commonplace than horror: Dracula is a supernatural potboiler, but it is also an immigrant’s story. In Dracula’s desire to master his adopted tongue, we can find evidence of his sinister dissembly, but we can also, if we wish to, envision a rather more endearing figure, and a deeply human one. Stoker’s Count is a man casting off the caul of an inhospitable homeland, seeking acceptance in a new country by following its demands, and becoming—as the saying would later go—more English than the English.

Surely this kind of "dissembly" as Ms. Marshall puts it is the stuff of enduring sf terror, as we find it in such films as The Thing, I Married a Monster From Outer Space, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and their various remakes, as well as works by Philip K. Dick and other masters, in which we cannot tell the "real humans" from the android "imposters."  Keep watching the skies, the ships, the pods, the replicants, your dreams...

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).

Happy Birthday, Bram Stoker!

Google has devoted a Google Doodle to you! The Christian Science Monitor discusses the five best Bram Stoker novel film adaptations here. More about Mr. Stoker himself here from the Monitor, a discussion of his effect on pop culture here in the Washington Post. Vampires have come of age: check out this True Blood site here.

A short bibliography of materials on vampires and law:

Bradney, Anthony, "The Morally Ambiguous Crowd": The Image of a Large Law Firm in "Angel," 56 Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 21 (2005).

Owen, A. Susan, Vampires, Postmodernity, and Postfeminism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 27 Journal of Popular Film and Television 24 (1999).

Sutherland, Sharon, Piercing the Corporate Veil--With a Stake?: Vampire Imagery and the Law, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Peter Day, ed., Rodopi, B.V., NY, 2006).

Websites:

Slayage: The Online Journal of the Whedon Studies Association.

Bram Stoker's Journal To Be Published

A "bloody good" (or a "bloody" good) story for Hallowe'en: the discovery of author Bram Stoker's journal on his descendant's Isle of Wight bookshelf. Noel Dobbs didn't know what he had until someone doing research contacted him to ask if he might have some information about Stoker's journal. Mr. Dobbs checked, and found the slim volume. Another relative, great-grand nephew Dacre Stoker, who resurrected a Bram Stoker novel called Dracula: The Un-Dead (due out next year) will also help publish the journal. The Lost Journal will also appear next year, the 100th anniversary of the death of Dracula's author.