This attempt has involved a number of the most subtle and rhetorically resourceful commentators on Irish culture and society.
As anyone who looks into a bibliography of recent criticism devoted to Stoker’s powerful but enigmatic novel will discover, together with a bewildering array of comment viewing it in the perspective of late imperial anxiety and the varieties of racial and sexual transgression, there has been a resourceful and sustained attempt to explicate Dracula in terms of specifically Irish contexts and concerns. It is hard to disagree with Valente’s account of the state of Dracula studies. In Valente’s view, following “a spate of historical exegesis, in which Bram Stoker’s masterwork emerged as an all purpose allegory for a series of distinct contemporary discourses on the state of the British people and society (degeneration theory, reverse colonialism, criminal anthropology, inversion theory, and the like), attention has increasingly focused upon the specific relevance of Stoker’s homeland to his most famous literary creation …” But, he seemed to imply, with the coming of the new century enough was enough. Writing in 2002, Joseph Valente asserted in the opening sentence of Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood that “the decade of the Irish Dracula ended in 2000”. Books discussed in this essay include: Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances, by RF Foster, Oxford University Press, 236 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-0199592166 From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker, by Paul Murray, Jonathan Cape, 340 pp, ISBN: 978-0224044622, The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula, by Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne, Constable, 288 pp, ISBN: 978-0094754300 and Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, by Seamus Deane, Clarendon Press, 270 pp, ISBN: 978-0198184904
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