Suspect Grounds: Temporal and Spatial Paradoxes in Bram Stoker's Dracula: a Postcolonial Reading

Abstract

This article offers a postcolonial reading of Bram Stoker's Gothic masterpiece Dracula. By triangulating three vectors for reading narrative--forms of history in the story, reading narrative in spatial terms and linking those terms to the culturally repressed memory of the Famine, the paper examines a number of paradoxes in the story to show that in fact the text is about the Famine and its persistence within Irish colonial memory. The result, we argue, is a very early exemplar of postcoloniality, one which led very directly to other examples of postcolonial rereading of Irish history and cultural study.