Discovering Dracula provides a resource exploring material culture in Bram Stoker's Dracula and the Victorian period in England through the items used and discussed by the characters in the novel.
This website seeks to aid students and teachers who are studying Dracula.
The contents of of the individual categories, "Writing," "Weapons," "Newspapers," and "Other" dive deeper into specific subsets of items in the novel. The "About the Book" section provides context information about Dracula. The bibliography provides the resources used to create this website and offers potential avenues for additional exploration relating to Dracula and material culture in literature.
A contact form can be found below if you want to share feedback or offer suggestions for expansions to the content included on this website.
The Project
This project was created for ENGL 625, "Ghosts, Goths, and Monsters" at Kansas State University in the fall of 2018.
The course description reads: "In the eighteenth century, there emerged a particular configuration of romance and terror that swept Europe in the form of the Gothic novel. Initially, this genre played upon a limited range of effects and structural patterns to present nightmarish visions of the collapse of the existing order of things. This class explores the specific contexts and resonances of some celebrated exemplars of the supernatural tale, from The Castle of Otranto to The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere; Frankenstein to Dracula, and traces the evolution of its characteristic concerns and devices as it bumps up against such literary movements as Sensibility, Romanticism and Victorianism. In addition to the primary texts, you will be encouraged to watch some of the many cinematic versions of the better-known novels and discuss how they reconfigure their sources."
The Class
At the time of the creation of this website, Macy Davis is a senior majoring in English with a concentration of creative writing at Kansas State University. She has a minor in mass communications and journalism and is a member of the University Honors Program. Macy plans on pursuing a career in youth services librarianship following the completion of a masters degree in library and information science. Macy's work in children's literature can be found at contextualizingtheclassics.wordpress.com