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4 - Dracula, Blood, and the New Woman: Stoker’s Reflections on the Zeitgeist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2022

By
Carol Senf
Edited by
Iosifina Foskolou  and
Martin Jones
Iosifina Foskolou
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Martin Jones
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

In this chapter the author probes beneath the melodramatic surface of the story of Count Dracula, to reveal more subtle narrative threads, relating to Bram Stoker's critical social observations, both looking back in time, where many metaphorical dimensions of ‘blood’ are in play, and forward in time to late-nineteenth-century changes in gender relations, particularly as encapsulated in the figure of the ‘New Woman’. Just as blood-steeped history is conspicuous on the melodramatic surface of the fiction, so a forward-looking, scientific, and liberated future is discernible just beneath that surface.

Keywords

womanhoodnew womanvampiretransfusionliteratureDracula
Type
Chapter
Information
Blood , pp. 65 - 83
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

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