Dracula by Bram Stoker

Critical quotations
 
Use the following critical quotations to support your analysis of the text and stimulate
discussion.

‘The shameless harlotry of Matilda, and the trembling innocence of Antonia, are
seized with equal avidity, as vehicles of the most voluptuous images ...’
S.T. Coleridge, writing about Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, 1797

‘Horace Walpole ... attempts to blend imagination and probability. Other writers
of Gothic narratives do the same, placing the reader in that liminal state
between our real world and the world of imagined fears and horrors. They also,
through their narrative methods, provide an unsettling fragmentation of
perspective, an unnerving sense of dark truths hidden below, or embedded in,
our everyday lives ...’
Bernard O’Keeffe, ‘Strange But True?’, The English Review, February 2011

‘With his ability to usurp the female role of creating life, his bite a kind of
demonic procreation in creating more vampires, and with his consumption of
blood as a triumph over fears of menstruation, it may be that Dracula is the
ultimate patriarchal fantasy.’
Ray Cluley, ‘The Lady is a Vamp’, emagazine, December 2010

‘An exercise in masculine anxiety and nationalist paranoia, Stoker’s novel is

filled with scenes that are staggeringly lurid and perverse.’
Sarah Waters, Vintage Classics edition of Dracula, 2007

‘I suppose that every book of the kind must contain some lesson, but I prefer
that readers should find it out for themselves.’
Bram Stoker, from an interview of July 1897, quoted in York Notes Advanced, 2006

‘Dracula embodies the fear of the unknown and he personifies the ‘nothing in
the darkness’ that keeps children awake at night.’
Steve Roberts, York Notes Advanced, 2006

‘Gothic fictions presented different, more exciting worlds in which heroines in

particular could encounter not only frightening violence but also adventurous
freedom. The artificiality of narratives imagined other worlds and also
challenged the forms of nature and reality advocated by eighteenth-century
social and domestic ideology.’
Fred Botting, The New Critical Idiom, Routledge, 1996

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