초록/요약

What is striking about Bram Stoker’s Dracula is that it is an expanding body of allegories and symbols, which continues to feed on different contexts and discourses. Almost all major readings of the text in recent decades are defined by an effort to find various meanings and concepts behind major characters or events for their allegorical consideration. The purpose of this essay is to examine how these symbolic transpositions can be viewed as part of a historical path of stylistic shifts in 19th-century Gothic fiction. By the historical path, I am referring to the way in which the allegorical process of figural conceptualization in Gothic fiction is informed by the scientific pursuit of physiological realism and negotiations expanding across the broad spectrum of knowledge and representations. The point of particular attention is an increasing sense of asymmetry in Gothic fiction reflecting the way the allegorical convention of figural simplification and symbolic condensation is counterpoised by the questions of what it means to create fictional personage cast in physiological functions and imperatives. I want to argue that Gothic fiction responds to this textual tension by giving birth to monsters, a site of anomalous bodily figurations in which issues of bodily peculiarities and urges can be addressed beneath the allegorical act of moral or cultural condemnation levelled at the gross flesh of inhumanity. The essay, first of all, gives a theoretical account of allegorical fo