Dublin is a city with a densely layered history. A site of collective habitation since the fourth century, the city is marked by successive waves of settlement and violence. As a result, Dublin has a rich material and cultural history, populated with iconic landmarks, historic buildings, and a host of urban legends. As a modern tourist destination, Dublin leverages this history in service of attracting visitors from around the world, promoting the city’s complex past and, in particular, its Gothic antecedents. In October 2012, Dublin City Council in partnership with Fáilte Ireland (the Irish tourism board) held the first of what was to become the annual Bram Stoker Festival. Each year the festival coincides with Hallowe’en – which originates from the Irish pagan festival of Samhain – and celebrates Stoker’s most well-known work, Dracula (1897). Since the original festival to commemorate one hundred years since Stoker’s death, the event has expanded to become a celebration of Dublin as a supernatural city. This is despite the fact that Dracula is not set in Ireland and is devoid of any Irish characters. However, the novel has long been interpreted as a parable for the Irish sectarian and class wars of the late nineteenth century. Given that Stoker was a native Dubliner, the novel has been reclaimed as a story with an Irish subtext, and Dublin as the home of the Vampire. This paper will chart the evolution of the Bram Stoker Festival and the concomitant reimaging of Dublin as a supernatural city over the past decade. The paper will consider the cult of Stoker and how, despite having only one work of merit, Stoker continues to be the most well-known Irish Gothic writer of all time. The paper will also examine how the festival has managed to expand from its original remit of Stoker and Dracula to a broader promotion of Dublin as a profoundly haunted city, one that now operates as a unique selling point for attracting tourists.

Read Reclaiming Gothic Dublin: Tourism and the Cult of Stoker

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a strong theme of xenophobia is at stake. This xenophobia not only applies generally as a fear of the foreign Other in relation to the vampire, but also specifically to a fear of the vampire as a culinary Other. Dracula survives solely upon the consumption of human blood, so his diet renders him a culinary Other by its contrast to an actual life-sustaining human diet, and also by its contrast to the variance and diversity of nutrients required for human survival. Exemplifying that contrast, Van Helsing and his somewhat multicultural/multigendered crew consume a variety of foods from a variety of international locations during their pursuit of Dracula, while also using innovative technologies. The crew is stronger in their diversity, the vampire weaker in homogeneity. This contrast parallels many of the realities of late-nineteenth century food consumption after the advent of food technologies like processed foods.

Read Exotic Homogeneity: Culinary Othering in Dracula

This article explores the evolution of Victorian vampires alongside the metaphorical notion of texts consuming their predecessors. Looking at James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it argues that later vampires were created through the consumption of earlier conventions, thus offering a unique contribution to scholarship by focusing on the rules of vampirism.

Read Playing Vampire Games: Rules and Play in Varney the Vampire and Dracula

This article looks at food and the role of appetitive consumption in modern representations of the vampire. Most critics have read vampire as embodying Victorian fears surrounding fin-de-siècle desire and sexual decadence. We instead want to shift the discussion to food and eating rituals. Using Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a bridge text, “Consuming Appetites and the Modern Vampire” compares the British tradition, which advocates disciplined appetites as defense against Dracula’s demonic invasion, with modern American texts, which celebrate the vampire as a reflection of its own culture of excess consumption. The vampire is marked as Other precisely by his inability to control his appetite, and the disciplined appetite is essential insofar as it differentiates between the human and vampiric Other. It is this legacy of appetitive excess which continues to inform our modern interpretations of the vampire, whether this figure is a direct inheritor of Dracula or a more sympathetic, even domesticated, vampire.

Read Consuming Appetites and the Modern Vampire