Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)
From Commonplace Book
Contents
General Notes
- it's hard to tell at a glance but it appears that in the late c19 Romania was an independent kingdom but Transylvania as a region was part of Austria-Hungary until WWI - cf Wiki Lands of the Crown of St Stephen
- also worth thinking about this narrative in terms of the more outward-looking foreign policy of the 80s and 90s (cf. Kucich's intro to Victorian novel handbook)
- 11 he's pretty anxious from the get go
- 21 tension btwn novel form and narrative form ("ch 2" / "JH's journal (cont.)")
- 22, 24 descriptions of the count's appearance
59 younger
- 26 dracula's English library
- 30 per penguin note, Harker's Kodak camera puts the narration at least in 1888
- 32-3 no reflection and the incident with H's razor
- 41 Dracula climbing the wall
- 43 Hamlet -- not even a complete ref to Shakespeare, familiarity is assumed (and fits with journal form too)
- 44-6 the count's 3 women
- 52 count dresses as harker
- 53 embodied dust motes/hypnotism
- 57 allusion to Pope's translation of Homer
- 61 "Mina is a woman, and there is nought in common." Isn't there?
- 62 Mina as New Woman (or influenced by them as she states herself)
- 66 Desdemona - Shakespeare's Othello
- 68 seward's diary kept on phonograph - novel gesturing toward multimedia
Theme Tracking
Narrated reading/writing
As opposed to narrational writing, which is the whole framing form
Materiality
Technology
Information, communication, else
States of consciousness
Nation/Empire
History
Shakespeare References
- 43 Hamlet's tablets
- 66 desdemona