Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Deviating from the conventional view that Dracula's vampirism is the narrative center through which Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) allegorizes the main concerns and anxieties of late-Victorian England, this paper argues that it is also through the Crew of Light that the novel dramatizes the implicit violence, ethical inconsistency, and hypocrite fracturing England then. Relying on Søren Kierkegaard's philosophical four-dialectic diagnosis of community, identified in Two Ages (1978), the paper explicates how the herd mentality of the community stimulates the existential antagonism between the Crew's societal leveling and the Count's subjective agency and unwavering tendency to stand out of the crowd. The paper eventually concludes that Dracula dramatizes the dissonance between the Kierkegaardian dialectic of the individual in community and the remaining three dialectics. This viewpoint contributes to related literature by identifying the philosophical milieu of Dracula 's gothic realism and by setting a framework for further research about the allegorical gravitas of the Gothic in different contexts.
Authors: Malek J. Zuraikat, Aida Omet, Ola Sami
Institutions: Yarmouk University, University of Jordan
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,180
OpenAlex ID: W7214438409