But the supernatural could not be excluded from serious ftction forever. Serious grown-ups did not bother with stories of giants, dragons, and devils. As fai- as sophisticated eighteenth-century readers were concerned, the supernatural was fit only for the nursery. The early English novel-the form developed in the first half of the eighteenth century, most famously by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding-declared its allegiance to the realistic depiction of everyday life. Before the nineteenth century, though, despite their popularity in orally transmitted folktales, vampires made few appearances in serious literattore. And vampires have been a recurring feature in many of the world's belief systems: the Un-Dead, feasting on the blood of the living, have shown up in ancient Persia, Greece, Babylon, Israel, and India, as well as in virtually every country in medieval Europe. The world's folklore and mythology are filled with monstrosities of every conceivable variety: man-eating dragons, mermaids, zombies, gargoyles, demons. Marshall's "Stoker's Dracuia and the Vampire's Literary History," the ftrst contribution in the "Contexts" section of this volume, sets Stoker's most famous achievement in the context ofthat developing literary genre. The Gothic novel-created in the eighteenth century, only to flower in the nineteenth-brings together the fantastic elements of the romance with the plausible psychology of real people. One is the old-fashioned romance, with its fondness for the supernatural and the miraculous the other is the realistic novel, with its painstaking detail of actual people living ordinary lives. It is one of the nineteenth century's most lasting and influential examples of the Gothic novel, a getire that blends two distinct strains of fiction. Jack Lynch Bram Stoker's Dracuia (1897) now seetns to be everywhere, but it did not come out of nowhere. The volume is rounded out by a chronology of the important events in Stoker's life, a list of his works, and a bibliography with suggestions for further reading. A longer section, "Critical Readings," follows, with samples of critical close readings from a number of schools of thought.
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The volume opens with several introductory essays before moving on to a section headed "Critical Contexts," on Dracula''?, context and reception, containing a series of wide-ranging overviews of the author's works and career. This means that most of the best criticism of Dracula has come in the last two decades, and the essays in this collection draw on that recent scholarship. But Stoker criticism virtually exploded over that same period, starting nearly at nothing: only two articles discussed him in the 1950s, compared to 208 in the 1990s, for an increase of 104 times. Another major nineteenth-century Gothic writer, Mary Shelley, went from a mere 12 articles in the 1950s to 443 in the 1990s, an increase of 37 About This Volume
The increase in Jane Austen scholarship has been even steeper: it went from 64 studies in the 1950s to 869 in the 1990s, an increase of 13.6 times. Between 19, it had grown to 1,270 four times as many articles on Dickens, that is to say, were published in the 1990s as in the 1950s.
Between 19, for instance, Charles Dickens was the subject of 312 items indexed in the Bibliography. Not every published study appears in the Bibliography, so these numbers are not definitive they do, however, give us a sense of the relative rise in critical interest over time. If we compare the number of articles on Bram Stoker to those of other major authors, we see increases between the 1950s and the 1990s across the board-the amount of literary criticism on virtually all authors has increased-but the rise in studies of Stoker is truly remarkable. This critical oversight is clear in the most comprehensive survey of literary criticism published in the last century, the MLA International Bibliography. Still, scholars paid little attention to the world's most famous vampire. The novel was successful enough on its original publication in 1897, and with each passing decade the Transylvanian Count became more familiar to the world at large. Unlike most other canonical works of literature, Dracula was nearly a century old before it was taken seriously by literary critics. This contribution to the Critical Insights series collects a number of critical studies with the aim of correcting the long neglect of the novel. But while the cultural myth is omnipresent, the original novel has too often been ignored. Bram Stoker, the Irish civil servantturned-theatrical manager, gave the world one of the great myths of the modem era. As I type this prefatory note, September is changing into October by month's end, Dracula masks and vampire decorations will be everywhere.
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