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Joseph Valente. Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. 192 pp.
Long recognized as a key text for the Victorian fin de siecle, Bram Stoker's Dracula was rarely placed in a distinctively Irish literary and cultural context until the 1990s. So it comes as something of a surprise to find that Joseph Valente's inventive new book on Stoker begins by announcing that "the decade of the Irish Dracula" is at an end. Postmillennial flourishes aside, however, Dracula's Crypt is in practice more concerned with radicalizing the insights that this "Hibernian school of criticism" has to offer than it is with burying them. Prior interpretations are closely interrogated, amended, and ultimately supplanted in favor of a reading that gives due weight to the semicolonial or, to use Valente's preferred term, "metrocolonial conditions of production" under which Stoker's most significant writing was produced, conditions that are simultaneously psychic and sociopolitical.
Valente is convinced that Dracula is Stoker's "masterpiece" and, in a controversial move, he compares what he sees as its intricate narrative design and subtle crosscutting ironies to the work of early modernists such as Ford, Conrad, and the early Joyce, rather than locating...