

This deliberate repetition and emphasis in description has a number of connotations to be explored yet theorists seem to overlook this curious phenomenon in Stoker’s novel. Stoker consistently uses the word voluptuous to describe female vampires in his novel. Luckhurst in his introduction to Dracula (2011) states, ‘historical distance reveals the book to be an uncanny echo-box of its place and time’ (p.xix).Taking into less consideration Bram Stoker’s position as a representative of late-Victorian ‘Man’, and reading Dracula as a representative late-Victorian text presents, as such, a text that is particularly revealing in its focus on Victorian sexual dynamics As part of this discourse Stoker’s Dracula can bring to light elements of the dialectic between the bulwarks of Victorian society and the attack of the New at the fin de siècle. Spencer (1992) notes, ‘Dracula is not an isolated phenomenon, but is part of a literary/cultural discourse’ (p.198). Discourses of degeneration were ubiquitous during the latter half of the nineteenth-century, thus approaching Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Conan Doyle’s The Parasite (1894) as an historical text is not to read them in isolation as a neutral report of the sociological climate of late Victorian Britain, but as part of a dialogue.
