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His Master’s Voice: Sound Devices in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

« La voix de son maître » : dispositifs sonores dans Dracula de Bram Stoker
Maria Parrino

Résumés

Un an après la publication de Dracula (1897), le photographe anglais Francis Barraud reçut une commande pour peindre un tableau à partir de son image d’un chien devant un phonographe à cylindre. Son œuvre, intitulée His Master’s Voice, est devenue l’un des logos les plus célèbres au monde. La peinture de Barraud est particulièrement significative car elle donne à voir non seulement l’objet par lequel la voix est amplifiée, mais également l’effet que produit cette voix amplifiée. Le phonographe montre comment les voix peuvent se déconnecter du corps matériel et soulève la question de ce qui constitue réellement une voix. Parmi les dispositifs technologiques modernes mentionnés dans le Dracula de Bram Stoker, le phonographe joue un rôle important, une présence à la fois déconcertante et rassurante. La puissance et l’effet troublant de la voix désincarnée sont évidents dans la réaction de Mina à l’enregistrement phonographique du Dr Seward, un dispositif « merveilleux » et « cruel » qui enregistre non seulement la voix du locuteur, mais aussi son ton, révélant ainsi des sons corporels que l’écriture cache. Dans Dracula, la tension entre la parole et l’écriture est constamment à l’œuvre car si les personnages sont de prolifiques auteurs de journaux et de lettres, ils n’en demeurent pas moins avides d’interaction orale. De l’appel de Renfield au vampire à la tentative de Dracula de maîtriser l’anglais oral afin de dissimiler ses origines étrangères, ce roman montre bien l’importance des dispositifs sonores dans la création littéraire.

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1One year after the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the English painter and photographer Francis Barraud completed a painting of his dog, Nipper, looking at and listening to a cylinder phonograph. Nipper belonged to Barraud’s dead brother whose voice had been recorded on a phonograph. Barraud, who had often noticed how puzzled the animal always was when he tried to make out where the voice came from, decided to paint that moment. In 1899, the London Gramophone and Typewriter Company agreed to buy the painting, but Barraud was asked to replace the phonograph with a gramophone. His work, entitled His Master’s Voice, became one of the most famous logos in the history of advertising. As Mladen Dolar notes, Barraud’s painting was particularly meaningful for two reasons: it raised the issue of how to paint a voice, and visualised the impact and effect that technological instruments had on the amplified voice. Furthermore, it made the voice appear ‘in its object-like quality by assembling the animal and the machine, short-circuiting humanity’ (Dolar 76).

2In this article, I intend to use this reference as a source of imagery, and to problematize the oral/aural issues in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Over the years, in the innumerable readings of Dracula, critics have pointed out the little space given to the vampire’s voice. In the novel, Dracula’s voice is first heard when he greets his guest on the threshold of his castle. Before the newly arrived Jonathan walks into his castle, the Count verbally expresses his pleasure in receiving his guest at his home three times: ‘Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!’ (Stoker 40); ‘Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!’ (Stoker 41); ‘I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome’ (Stoker 41). After the guest walks in and is given accommodation, the vampire engages in a conversation with Jonathan about his wish to move to London, the city which he calls ‘the whirl and rush of humanity’ (Stoker 45). He who comes from the ‘whirlpool of European races’ (Stoker 52) aspires to be part of the London ‘crowd’ and penetrate from the inside its vital cycle of life and death. Yet the insider that Dracula imagines is one equipped with language abilities. And one of the language skills he is particularly concerned about is spoken English, as he explains to Jonathan:

‘I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak’.
‘But, Count’, I said, ‘you know and speak English thoroughly!’
He bowed gravely.
‘I thank you, my friend, for your all too flattering estimate, but yet I fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them’.
‘Indeed,’ I said, ‘you speak excellently’ (Stoker 45)

3Dracula, the polyglot brought up among the many languages of the Carpathians, wants to make sure his oral English is appropriate and considers his guest, the Englishman Jonathan Harker, the ideal native speaker to verbally interact with in order to improve his oral skills. Although Dracula already has—as his guest notes—an ‘excellent’ knowledge of the English language, he aims at more than proficiency. He knows the grammar and the lexicon but does not know how ‘to speak them’, a feature of crucial importance to him. But why is Dracula so worried about his spoken English? Here is the reason in his own words:

Well I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not—and to not know is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he see me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say ‘Ha, ha! A stranger!’ I have been so long master that I would be master still—or at least that none other should be master of me. (Stoker 45)

4Dracula’s attempt to learn vernacular English proves his intention to place himself in a public relationship, which although it is predatory is also communicative, or in Bakhtinian terms, dialogical. Dracula does not want to be singled out as a ‘stranger’—by which he means a foreigner—and wishes instead to be ‘like the rest’. Like the rest, in the London whirl of humanity, he might engage in a conversation with native speakers, he might become not only visible but audible. In that case, his pronunciation will reveal the foreigner, the alien, the one who does not belong. In order for that not to happen, the vampire develops an ambitious and obsessive aim to equip himself with the correct English spoken language, convinced that such a skill will ‘let him in’. He is afraid that the un-English sound of his voice might betray his foreignness and consequently lower his status, downgrading him to a stranger. The vampire who can transform into a bat, a dog, a wolf, and even become mist, worries about his spoken language and how its specific features—such as accent and pronunciation—may mark him as a foreigner. Such a perspective is disturbing for a vampire who does not want to be found without mastery of any kind. In order to avoid that, he needs to be master of his voice: proper oral language is the condition for his mastery. Only in this way, may he transfer to London and achieve the kind of mastery he is in possession of in his own country.

5When Dracula decides to gain possession of the English spoken language, he has in mind a method which he proposes to Jonathan: ‘You shall, I trust, rest here with me a while, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even the smallest, in my speaking’ (Stoker 45). Dracula, who wants to learn the correct ‘intonation’ of the words, seems to be well aware that language learning is not merely a passive accumulation of terms but implies instead bodily agency, literally an incorporation, which he is ready to submit to by listening to the words produced by the English native speaker. As Dolar points out, ‘[i]ncorporating the voice of the other is essential if one is to learn to speak; for the acquisition of language . . . consists in incorporating the voice’ (Dolar 81). This is what seems to happen to Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire who, in his first physical engagement with his guest, wishes to ‘suck’ out of Jonathan’s body not blood but the sound of his voice. Thus Jonathan unaware plays a double role: he who is about to sell a property to Dracula is at the same time engaged in transferring to his client a propriety of the language, his oral English.

6Dracula has studied the grammar and the lexicon, but in order to achieve language acquisition he needs to abandon the ‘book’ language he is in possession of, but also trapped in (Stoker 45). What his language needs is a bodily trait, a voice able to pronounce sounds, a voice that transforms the written into the oral, the reader into the speaker. But what pronunciation does Dracula have in mind? One that is standardised, and that he believes he can learn by imitation. Yet oral language acquisition is not simply a matter of words entering the ears and then being mechanically replicated. Human voices are not achieved in a cut and paste manner, instead they first imitate and then add personal traits to what would otherwise be an impersonal standard sound. Dracula seems unaware that only a personalization of the standard prevents the oral language from being an artificial sound. Dracula instead seeks a language that is centralized and resists other languages, ignoring that standard language is a virtual construction, which becomes alive only in its individual, social and cultural variations. He is unaware of the fact that a language is a constant assemblage and overlapping of varieties, a condition which ensures its dynamics.

7Dracula never learns to speak English like a native because, as Christine Ferguson notes, he is unable to ‘bastardize the language in the same way as its domestic speakers’ (Ferguson 239). He remains static, whereas his antagonists are linguistically mobile. Paradoxically, in a narrative that does not give the vampire much ‘voice’, Dracula’s obsessive concern with language standardization turns out to be what distinguishes him from the other foreigners. Unlike Dracula, Dutchman Van Helsing for example, who is perfectly aware of his mangling of the language (pronunciation as well as syntax and grammar), never worries about his poor English which, in fact, does not prevent him from successfully leading the British vampire hunters against the nosferatu. As David Punter notes, among the many ‘foreign bodies’ in the novel, the main opposition concerns the linguistic opposition between the foreigner Dracula and the foreigner Van Helsing (Punter 39). Even the other foreigner of the story, the Texan Quincey Morris, is at ease among his British friends, who nevertheless, in more than one case, underline the character’s American odd pronunciation. This not only proves another example of a non-standardized English speaker who participates in the ‘whirl’, but also shows that differences are welcomed. As Lucy remarks, it amuses her to hear Quincey talk American slang (Stoker 79). Hence, the English speakers who surround Dracula represent the diverse ways in which English can be spoken, heard and mediated. They embody the disruptive and evasive mechanism of language that the vampire yet fails to master.

8But if Dracula fails to truly assimilate a foreign tongue, there are moments when he does achieve language mastery. Among Dracula’s rare direct speeches is a dialogue with Mina—actually more of a monologue—in which he orders her to be at his command (Stoker 288). His tone and the words are so frightening that they silence his interlocutor. When Dracula enters the bedroom where Jonathan is sleeping, he threatens Mina not to make a sound or else he will ‘take [her husband] and dash his brains out before [her] very eyes’ (Stoker 287). This flow of peremptory words is briefly interrupted by his sucking blood from Mina, and immediately followed by another sequence of words whose tone shocks the listener, proving that despite his somewhat standardized and limited language, Dracula does manage to impose ‘his master’s voice’. And although he has not had time to practise his English with many speakers, in this verbal interaction he sounds more than convincing. The threat of what will happen to those who ‘cross’ his path is uttered with force and articulated in an eloquent form which blends a military, political and psychological lexicon, whereby fighters, hunters, commanders and nations are all playing their ‘wits’ against one another.

9But what is the outcome of Dracula’s attempts to gain mastery through oral language? What decisive function does his voice have in the narrative? Apparently, there isn’t one. The voice is lost in the text. Dracula’s pronunciation, no matter how perfect, becomes irrelevant in the development of the story. Dracula, the man Van Helsing defines as having a ‘child’s brain’, makes every effort to move out of the condition of the infant, the condition of the ‘young child who is unable to speak’ as the etymological meaning of the word ‘infant’ reads. Despite this effort, the vampire’s vocal aspiration remains frustrated, since most of the times his voice is unuttered and unheard. It will take vampire literature about eighty years to give full voice to the un-dead, their voices emerging first in Anne Rice’s vampire trilogy where they are even invited to a proper (and recorded!) interview.

10Evidence of the fact that Dracula’s voice does not have agency in the text emerges by looking at Renfield, the madman in Dr Seward’s asylum. Renfield, the zoophagous patient who waits for Dracula to arrive, is the character who gives the vampire authority and authorization by saying ‘Come in, Lord and Master!’ (Stoker 281). Renfield pronounces the words which Dracula needs to hear in order to step in, that is to say, he gives Dracula his mastery by pronouncing him such. It is certainly not the kind of mastery Dracula has imagined; it is the call of the lunatic but unarguably it is what makes it possible for the ‘Master’ to enter. Dracula, the foreigner, one who has been outside the door, is called in by Renfield’s voice. Thus Dracula becomes ‘Master’ by means of someone else’s voice. In other words, the most immaterial part of a human’s body is what allows the vampire to be one. This reminds us that the voice itself is a liminal phenomenon, that it stands at a paradoxical and ambiguous topological spot, at the intersection of body and language. As Dolar points out, ‘the voice is part neither of language nor of the body’ (Dolar 73).

  • 1 Mina’s lack of familiarity is perhaps surprising since phonographs were popular in England at the e (...)

11Stoker’s text explores both the material and the immaterial feature of the voice and does so by means of two practices: phonographic recordings, which capture voice on wax, and shorthand, which commits sounds to paper. Among the modern technological devices mentioned in the novel, the phonograph plays an important role as its presence is both disconcerting and reassuring. It demonstrates how voices may produce an uncanny effect, and raises the issue of what actually constitutes a voice. In Dracula, both the power and the uncanny effect of the disembodied voice emerge in Mina’s reaction to a phonographic recording. When she first goes to visit Dr Seward to give him news about Jonathan’s diary, while walking towards the doctor’s studio she pauses at the door for a moment before entering, for she thinks she hears him talking to someone (Stoker 226–27). When she is called in, to her immense surprise she notices that the doctor is alone, and on the table opposite him is an object, the phonograph, which she has never seen. (Stoker 227).1

12Indeed, this modern and efficient instrument of precision has some disquieting features: the phonograph leaves trace of the speaker’s tone, as Mina alarmingly notes after listening to Dr Seward’s recordings:

That is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to Almighty God. No one must hear them spoken ever again! See, I have tried to be useful. I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as I did. (Stoker 229)

13To Mina the ‘cruel’ and ‘wonderful’ machine records not only the speaker’s voice but also its tone, thus revealing the bodily sounds which writing, instead, hides. Moreover, listening to Seward’s voice on the phonograph seems to put Mina in an intimate relationship with the doctor.

He brought back the phonograph from my room, and I took my typewriter. He placed me in a comfortable chair, and arranged the phonograph so I could touch it without getting up, and showed me how to stop it in case I should want to pause. Then he very thoughtfully took a chair, with his back to me, so that I might be as free as possible, and began to read. I put the forked metal to my ears and listened. When . . . done . . . I lay back in my chair powerless. (Stoker 230)

14If it is tempting to read such act of private listening as a moment of erotic implications, as John M. Picker notes, the scene unquestionably suggests the power of hearing and sound (Picker 135).

15Phonographic representations in Dracula go beyond the literal. As Picker notes, the text itself ‘emerges from sound, that is, sound-writing’ (Picker 134). From the first lines of the novel—Jonathan Harker’s Journal (kept in shorthand)’—to the series of listeners and writers of encoded and decoded voices, the novel displays a wide range of recording sound experiences.

16It is a fact that in Dracula, the distinction between speech and writing is constantly under pressure. From Dr Seward, to Jonathan, to Mina, the urge to write is one of the indisputable features of the novel. As Dr Seward notes, ‘Ebb tide in appetite to-day. Cannot eat, cannot rest, so diary instead’ (Stoker 82) and Jonathan admits in a moment of despair, ‘As I must do something or go mad, I write this diary’ (Stoker 289). Mina even finds time in her journal to express her gratitude to the man who invented the ‘Traveller’s’ typewriter without which, she admits, ‘I should have felt quite astray doing the work if I had to write with a pen. . . .’ (Stoker 344), a reminder not only of features of 19th-century technology but of the success of the recent innovation (Page 98). Yet at times, the text shows the limits of writing, and speech seems to be given priority. There is a moment for example, when, despite its inescapable power to display ‘the anguish’ of the heart, Dr Seward confesses that he ‘misses his phonograph’. In another moment, Mina seems to be aware of vocalization as she claims that writing in her journal is like ‘whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time’ (Stoker 93).

17Despite the character’s urge and will to preserve a recorded documentation of some kind, at one point, Dracula destroys not only the written documents, which Mina has worried about and so meticulously copied, but also the phonograph which contains the recorded voices. ‘All the manuscript had been burned, and the blue flames were flickering amongst the white ashes; the cylinders of your phonograph too were thrown on the fire, and the wax had helped the flames’ (Stoker 286). It is evident that no residue, not even an oral one, should be left behind Dracula. The image of the burning cylinders that had carried the voices reduces them to their material essence: wax.

18A further exploration of the relationship between voice and writing in Dracula is given by shorthand. Shorthand, or stenography, is a method of writing signs instead of letters, a technique used in order to produce a text more rapidly by means of fewer graphic traces on the page; technically, it is one written language substituting for another. Shorthand, which was used in ancient Greece and Rome, was modernized in 1837 by Isaac Pitman who explained in Phonology, or Writing by Sound (1842) what it consisted of: ‘A Natural Method of Writing All Languages by One Alphabet, Composed of Signs That Represent the Sounds of the Human Voice’. Despite Pitman’s claim that by this method, ‘a speaker can be followed verbatim, without the use of any arbitrary marks, beyond the letters of the alphabet’, stenography has a rather mysterious trait, the narrow graphic symbols only vaguely resembling letters of an alphabet. As Mina points out in her journal, after expressing the pleasant feeling of being ‘soothed’ by the act of writing, ‘there’s something about the shorthand symbols that makes it different from writing’ (Stoker 93). Although we are not told what that ‘something’ is, which makes it more intriguing and more uncanny, Geoffrey Wall calls this moment of self-duplication and self-displacement, a ‘passage from the terrible fluidity of phantasy to the soothing fixity of text’ (Wall 16). In other words, writing is reassuring.

19Jonathan and Mina share expertise in shorthand, both being middle-class professionals (the former a solicitor and the latter a school teacher), who ‘assiduously’ practice their skills. Jonathan’s whole account of his journey to Transylvania is in shorthand, and such a practice has a strategic function in the narration. Besides recording information quickly and efficiently, shorthand in Dracula prevents the transmission of information because it limits the number of potential readers. Mina not only uses her writing abilities to hide her text but she even plays tricks on Van Helsing to whom she hands her shorthand text, unable to resist ‘the temptation of mystifying him a bit’. Such a baffling behaviour, due to what Mina calls ‘the taste of the original apple that remains in our mouths’ (Stoker 193), produces an active and thinking force in the female character. As Alison Case notes, it provides Mina with ‘a higher level of understanding than has been officially permitted to her’ (Case 230). Mina’s acquisition of knowledge leaves her with an empowered role, the eating of ‘the original apple’ being literally enjoyable and symbolically emancipatory. If shorthand empowers Jonathan and Mina with a language of their own, it is on the contrary rather disturbing for Dracula. Unable to read his guest’s letters written in stenography—literally and figuratively being excluded by the written text—Dracula is horrified when he discovers that Jonathan has written in ‘strange symbols’ (Stoker 65), although what irritates the vampire most is that the letter is not signed, ‘a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality!’ (Stoker 65).

20Besides phonographic recordings and shorthand, Dracula poses a wide range of issues regarding transcription including transcribing phonetics. There is an episode in the novel when Jonathan complains about being misled by the ‘spelling’ of an address written by Mr Smollet, a Cockney working-class man. The note he receives reads: ‘Sam Bloxam, Korkrans, 4 Poters Cort, Bartel Street, Walworth. Arsk for the depite’ (Stoker 265). The misspelling makes Jonathan ask for Poters’ instead of Potter’s Court. I agree here with Garrett Stewart who underlines that Jonathan’s claim of the phonetic effect is rather confusing and difficult to recognize (hear) for as readers we subvocalize, and therefore it is not a matter of phonetic spelling but of phonetic reading (Stewart 1990 and 2008). In fact, as Stewart explains, Mr Smollet’s text—complicated by the fact that it is written ‘with a carpenter’s pencil in a sprawling hand’ (Stoker 265)—does indeed contain a typical phonetic spelling case, the misspelling of the word ‘deputy’ as ‘depite’. But the case arises only when Jonathan hears the word pronounced by a speaker with a non-standard English accent. Jonathan’s attempt to write down exactly what he hears highlights the issue of transcribing phonetics: ‘“What are you?” I asked. “I’m the depity”, he answered. I saw at once that I was on the right track. Phonetic spelling had again misled me’ (Stoker 265). Stewart gives a very detailed reading of this part of the novel, and points out that the heading ‘phonetic spelling’ refers more appropriately to the fact that Jonathan ‘mishear[s] the u as i while thinking to turn the long-e sound of y into a rebus of itself’ (Stewart 2008).

21Throughout the novel, the issue of transcribing phonetics and spoken language emerges in various circumstances, from the narrative reporting the language of the captain and the sailors on board the Czarina Catherine to Mina’s conversation with Mr Swales in the Whitby cemetery. In the former case, Van Helsing’s description of his conversation with the captain displays the complexity of the oral language, as it is spoken and perceived even by a foreigner: ‘The captain swore polyglot—very polyglot—polyglot with bloom and blood; but he could do nothing’ (Stoker 314–15). The bloom and blood are the terms of British most common curses but, as Jennifer Wicke notes, ‘they also connect to the polyglot nature of national “blood” or language’ (Wicke 488). In the latter case, although Mina admits she does not understand Mr Swales’s dialect, she provides a remarkable extensive written text of the verbal interaction.

22As several critics have stressed, in Dracula Mina is the agent of the production and circulation of the text. Her secretarial work plays a crucial role, not because she transcribes what she hears, but because the process of transcription entrusts her with important ‘secrets’. Throughout the novel, Mina is in charge of a large number of written texts, her act of writing, copying and duplicating having been given a wide range of interpretations. Mina’s transcriptions are like Van Helsing’s ‘furious transfusions’ and challenge the vampire by ‘pumping words’ from one repository to another (Ellmann xix). Mina’s writing is what assures the existence of the narrative, and the very essential trait of the novel: words on the page.

23Thus it seems that, at the end of the novel the attempt to capture the voice which is manifest throughout the narrative surrenders to the written text. Even if non-authentic, Dracula is a document, as the reader is told in the final note, a fragmented and mutilated residue of a complex written story. But I would like to suggest that since there are no ‘proofs’ to believe ‘so wild a story’ (Stoker 369), it is left to the oral narrative which Mina’s child will hear from his parents to validate and forward the story. In other words (pun intended), in such an articulated story of written documents of all kinds, orality and aurality prevail.

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Bibliographie

Case, Alison. ‘Tasting the Original Apple: Gender and the Struggle for Narrative Authority in Dracula’. Narrative 1 (1993): 224–43.

Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.

Ellmann, Maud. ‘Introduction’, Bram Stoker, Dracula. Oxford: OUP, 1998: vii-xxxviii.

Ferguson, Christine. ‘Non-Standard Language and the Cultural Stakes of Stoker’s Dracula’. ELH 71.1 (2004): 229–49.

Page, Leanne. ‘Phonograph, Shorthand, Typewriter: High Performance Technologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. Victorian Network 3.2 (Winter 2011): 95–113.

Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: OUP, 2003.

Punter, David. ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Tradition, Technology, Modernity’. Post/Modern Dracula. From Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis. Ed. John S. Bak. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 31–41.

Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices. Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Stewart, Garrett ‘Phonemanography: Romantic to Victorian’. ‘“Sounding of Things Done”: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era’. Romantic Circle Praxis Series April 2008. Ed. Susan Wolfson <http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/praxis/soundings> [accessed 13 March 2021].

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s Press, 2002.

Wall, Geoffrey. ‘“Different from Writing”: Dracula in 1897’. Literature and History 10.1 (Spring 1984): 15–23.

Wicke, Jennifer. ‘Vampire Typewriting: Dracula and its Media’. EHL 59 (1992): 487–93.

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Notes

1 Mina’s lack of familiarity is perhaps surprising since phonographs were popular in England at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in Dracula, besides Dr Seward, Lucy owns a phonograph (Stoker 156; 166), evidently a modern technological device which middle-class households could have well afforded.

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Maria Parrino, « His Master’s Voice: Sound Devices in Bram Stoker’s Dracula »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 94 Automne | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2021, consulté le 19 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/9789 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.9789

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Auteur

Maria Parrino

Maria Parrino obtained her first PhD in English Studies from the University of Genova, Italy (1989) and discussed a dissertation on Italian-American women’s autobiographies. She then obtained a second PhD at the University of Bristol (2014) with a thesis on nineteenth-century English Gothic Literature. She is currently a full-time teacher of English Language and Literature in a Secondary School in Vicenza, Italy and a Subject Expert at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice. In 2018 she co-organized the International Bicentenary Conference on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the University of Venice. She has published textbooks on short stories and Gothic Literature. Her articles include ‘“Signs for Speech”. Language Learning in Frankenstein’ (2015); ‘Crossing the Borders: Hospitality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire’ (2017) and ‘Gothic and Earlier Painting: Nightmares and Premature Burials in Fuseli and Wiertz’ (2019).
Maria Parrino est docteur en études anglaises de l’université de Gênes avec une thèse sur les autobiographies de femmes italo-américaines soutenue en 1989. En 2014, elle obtient un deuxième doctorat à l’université de Bristol avec une thèse sur la littérature gothique anglaise du xixe siècle. Elle enseigne actuellement l’anglais et la littérature dans un établissement secondaire à Vicence, en Italie, et intervient également en tant qu’experte à l’université Ca’ Foscari de Venise. En 2018, elle a co-organisé la Conférence internationale du Bicentenaire du Frankenstein de Mary Shelley à l’université de Venise. Elle a publié des manuels sur les nouvelles et la littérature gothique. Ses articles comprennent ‘“Signs for Speech”. Language Learning in Frankenstein’ (2015); ‘Crossing the Borders: Hospitality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire’ (2017) et ‘Gothic and Earlier Painting: Nightmares and Premature Burials in Fuseli and Wiertz’ (2019).

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