Dracula, Bram Stoker - David Seed (essay date June 1985)

David Seed (essay date June 1985)

SOURCE: Seed, David. “The Narrative Method of Dracula.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40, no. 1 (June 1985): 61-75.

[In the following essay, Seed provides a stylistic analysis of Dracula.]

When Bram Stoker's Dracula first appeared in 1897, it was greeted with a chorus of acclaim for its power from the reviewers. One dissenting voice was that of the Athenaeum, which charged the novel with structural weakness:

Dracula is highly sensational, but it is wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense. It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events; but there are better moments that show more power.1

This aloof dismissal seems to have established a consensus attitude toward the novel that has met with an almost complete critical silence. Only of recent years have critics begun to...

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