BOOK REVIEW: Joseph Valente.DRACULA'S CRYPT: BRAM STOKER, IRISHNESS, AND THE QUESTION OF BLOOD. pp. xiv + 172. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Abstract

Over the past decade Dracula has passed into a new phase of its increasingly hectic afterlife. Consigned for most of the twentieth century to the margins of serious academic discussion, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel can now be found near the center of some of the more lively, not to say contentious, critical debates of the early twenty-first century. As even a quick trawl through the MLA Bibliography reveals, Dracula studies have grown exponentially in recent years, in part because Stoker's text has proven so useful to critics of all methodological bents. Dracula, like Dracula, is an accomplished shape-shifter, able to take on whatever critical contours a given situation appears to call for. As Joseph Valente notes a bit ruefully at the start of Dracula's Crypt, the novel has "emerged as an all-purpose allegory" (1), of use to critics committed to a wide range of often antithetical agendas. Indeed, Stoker's novel has become one of those privileged textual sites where literary critics meet to do battle over matters not simply exegetical but more broadly methodological.