The Un-Death of the Author: The Fictional Afterlife of Bram Stoker

Abstract

As an author, Bram Stoker has long been the subject of an intense process of fictionalisation. This process is, arguably, almost totally a consequence of the critical drive to interpret Dracula through the biography of its author, to trace its origins in what have been conventionally interpreted as the significant but traumatic incidents of Stoker’s life, from his mysterious childhood illness to the alleged syphilis which supposedly hastened his death. As Barbara Belford asserts in the Introduction to her Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (1996),

Calumnies have been spawned to justify the premise that no genial Irishman could have written such a perversely sexual novel. In biography and fiction, Stoker variously has been given a frigid wife, a penchant for prostitutes (particularly during their menstrual period), a sexually transmitted disease, and inherited insanity. (1996: x)