Gothic Realism, or Reading is Believing in Dracula

Abstract

This essay explores the ways Bram Stoker brings eighteenth-century affective gothic reading practices to bear on Victorian fiction’s investments in realism. By investigating modes of affective reading in Dracula, the essay develops a definition of ‘gothic realism’ to describe an affective experience of the real that gothic fiction offers in place of verisimilitude and representations of everyday life. Beginning by tracing the explicit and implicit histories of this term through both literary criticism and the gothic tradition, the essay turns to Dracula to discover an alternative definition of ‘gothic realism’ that bridges a longstanding divide between the colonial fractures intrinsic to nineteenth-century Irish literature and the claims to coherent representational reality usually aligned with the Victorian novel. ‘Gothic realism’ becomes a term, and a reading practice, for newly understanding how the gothic entwines with realism across both British and Irish nineteenth-century fiction, not as its critical antithesis, or as its hidden secret, but as an affective mode through which we can see nineteenth-century Irish novels representing the realities of the world around them.