Dracula—the Route to Canonization and After

abstract:This analysis considers the process by which a novel long associated with popular culture was accepted into the canon and the extraordinarily mixed critical results that followed. The process of establishing Bram Stoker's Dracula as significant literature often distorted key features of the work while promoting speculative and misleading conclusions about important aspects of Victorian life. But Dracula possesses a sophisticated organization, with a linguistic range and awareness of key Victorian scholarly disciplines, including paleontology and comparative anatomy, and the new document-based historiography of Niebuhr and von Ranke. This study reveals that Stoker's novel is worthy of its place in the canon on its own merits and without recourse to fanciful theorizing.