This apparently extends even to his having produced a quite accurate version of how Dutchmen speak English in Van Helsing’s singular idiolect. Also, if you check as I have done, how many ‘original texts’ Stoker uses in each of his chapters to maintain the illusion that his gothic yarn is ‘real’, you’ll see that he did make a remarkable effort to compose his novel. And it does take a still poorly understood type of talent to make this weird vampire tale survive since its inception in 1897, after spawning so many other creatures of the night. Eliot, Flaubert and Tolstoy could never have written Dracula, for good or bad. I agree that Dracula is not in the same league as “ Middlemarch or Madame Bovary or War and Peace” but, then, we’re comparing here different kinds of talent. Wilson gently mocks Stoker’s efforts, sentencing that while “he writing is of a powerful, workaday sensionalistic kind”, in his view “No one in their right mind would think of Stoker as a ‘great writer’”. In the introduction to my oldish 1983 edition of Dracula (Oxford’s World Classics), A.N. And, to my surprise, I have found Stoker’s masterpiece scarier than ever. I’ve tried to become, nonetheless, a reader as inexperienced as possible in my recent re-reading of this atmospheric novel, carried out in preparation of lectures beginning next week. Those of us who return to this bizarre text now and then do so with our vision also colonized by the ubiquitous media vampire, regardless of our previous readings of the text. Even new readers carry with them countless images of the vampire in fiction and film (and in many other media, even toys and food). Reading Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula with fresh eyes is practically impossible.
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