Britain, Vampire Empire: Fin-de-Siècle Fears and Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the more important contributions to Dracula scholarship in recent years has been the examination of Bram Stoker’s bloodthirsty Count as a stereotypical Jewish figure. Although this reading has helped to elucidate both the specific nature of the vampire’s threat to fin-de-siècle England and the prevalent Christian thematics and iconography of Stoker’s novel, literary critics have failed to consider Count Dracula’s consanguineous connections with other characters within the Gothic literary tradition. Adapting Royce MacGillivray’s claim that Stoker created in Dracula ‘a myth comparable in vitality to that of the Wandering Jew, Faust, or Don Juan’ (518), I would maintain that while the aristocratic figure of Count Dracula uniquely combines all three figures, he represents the apogee in the development of the vampiric Wandering Jew in British Gothic literature. As Henry Ludlam’s 1962 biography of Stoker makes clear, the Wandering Jew had long haunted Stoker’s imagination. As supportive evidence, Ludlam cites Stoker’s lifelong friend, writer Hall Caine, the ‘Hommy-Beg’ to whom Dracula is dedicated. Thinking back over their attempts to fit Stoker’s boss, acclaimed actor Henry Irving, with a suitable dramatic role, Caine wrote, ‘I remember that most of our subjects dealt with the supernatural, and that the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman and the Demon Lover were themes around which our imagination[s] constantly revolved’ (97).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".