Narrative
As an epistolary novel, Dracula is narrated through a series of documents.[93] The novel's first four chapters are related as the journals of Jonathan Harker. Scholar David Seed notes that Harker's accounts function as an attempt to translocate the "strange" events of his visit to Dracula's castle into the nineteenth-century tradition of travelogue writing.[94] John Seward, Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker all keep a crystalline account of the period as an act of self-preservation; David Seed notes that Harker's narrative is written in shorthand to remain inscrutable to the Count, protecting his own identity, which Dracula threatens to destroy.[95][96] Harker's journal, for example, embodies the only advantage during his stay at Dracula's castle: that he knows more than the Count thinks he does.[97] The novel's disparate accounts approach a kind of narrative unity as the narrative unfolds. In the novel's first half, each narrator has a strongly characterised narrative voice, with Lucy's showing her verbosity, Seward's businesslike formality, and Harker's excessive politeness.[98] These narrative styles also highlight the power struggle between vampire and his hunters; the increasing prominence of Van Helsing's broken English as Dracula gathers power represents the entrance of the foreigner into Victorian society.[96]
Genre
Dracula is a common reference text in discussions of Gothic fiction. Jerrold E. Hogle notes Gothic fiction's tendency to blur boundaries, pointing to sexual orientation, race, class, and even species. Relating this to Dracula, he highlights that the Count "can disgorge blood from his breasts" in addition to his teeth; that he is attracted to both Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray; appears both racially western and eastern; and how he is an aristocrat able to mingle with homeless vagrants.[99] Stoker drew extensively from folklore in crafting Count Dracula, but many of the Count's physical attributes were typical of Gothic villains during Stoker's lifetime. In particular, his hooked nose, pale complexion, large moustache and thick eyebrows were likely inspired by the villains of Gothic fiction.[100] Likewise, Stoker's selection of Transylvania has roots in the Gothic. Writers of the mode were drawn to Eastern Europe as a setting because travelogues presented it as a land of primitive superstitions.[101] Dracula deviates from Gothic tales before it by firmly establishing its time—that being the modern era.[102] The novel is an example of the Urban Gothic subgenre.[103]
Dracula became the subject of critical interest into Irish fiction during the early 1990s.[104] Dracula is set largely in England, but Stoker was born in Ireland, which was at that time part of the British Empire, and lived there for the first 30 years of his life.[105] As a result, a significant body of writing exists on Dracula, Ireland, England, and colonialism. Calvin W. Keogh writes that Harker's voyage into Eastern Europe "bears comparison with the Celtic fringe to the west", highlighting them both as "othered" spaces. Keogh notes that the Eastern Question has been both symbolically and historically associated with the Irish question. In this reading, Transylvania functions as a stand-in for Ireland.[106] Several critics have described Count Dracula as an Anglo-Irish landlord.[107]
