Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Miller (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Desert Island Books; 1 edition (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1874287104
• ISBN-13: 978-1874287100
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,645,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Good Collection of "Dracula" Criticism from the Novel's Centenary, 1997., June 14, 2006

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mirasreviews (McLean, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow (Hardcover)

"The Shade and the Shadow" is an anthology of literary criticism presented at the "Dracula 97" convention in Los Angeles in 1997 on the centenary of the publication of Bram Stoker's "Dracula", edited by Elizabeth Miller, who organized the Academic Program at the conference. "Dracula" has come a long way in academia since UC Berkeley professor Leonard Wolf struggled to have the novel taken seriously in the 1970s. Elizabeth Miller has compiled 20 academic papers from among 80 presented at "Dracula 97" whose subjects range from new ideas about Stoker's inspirations, to the obligatory debunking of "Dracula" myths, to studies of the novel's Victorian social context. Dr. Miller is to be commended for her selection. The great majority of these essays are thought-provoking and very readable. I am a "Dracula" hobbyist, not a scholar, so I don't keep up with academic journals. But I do read criticism that is published in books, and I was pleased that "The Shade and the Shadow" does not contain too much rehashing of ideas I've read too many times already.

After Nina Auerbach speaks to our ongoing preoccupation with the centenarian "Dracula" in her introductory essay, "The Shade and the Shadow" is organized into 5 sections: "Dracula and the Germans" includes 3 essays on German elements in the novel. "Dracula and the Victorians" contains 4 essays on the positivist and anti-positivist ideas, early psychoanalytic theories, and Russophobia in "Dracula". "Dracula: The Text" includes 4 essays on the profusion of narratives, private jokes, and "illogicalities" in the text, as well as an analysis of Stoker's "The Lady" as an inversion of "Dracula". "The Historical Dracula" offers 3 essays about Vlad Tepes, the name "Dracula", and the symbolic significance of the stake in his folklore. "Dracula: New Perspectives" features 5 essays that discuss Count Dracula's "reptilian" brain (my favorite in this book, by Valerie Clemens), the novel's fetishistic iconography, its critique of rigidly defined masculinity, information entropy and negative entropy in "Dracula", and Stoker's Anglo-Irish binarism.