ELH 

Abstract: The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism Author(s): Alan Liu Source: ELH, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 721-771 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873158 . Accessed: 13/07/2014 01:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 13 Jul 2014 01:51:25 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Abstract: In the Introduction to the Grundrisse Marx asks, thinking about the relation of Greek art to the present day: "What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit-Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature . . . it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square?"' The incongruity-and mastery-of Dracula lies in its willingness to set the mythological, Gothic, medieval mystery of Count Dracula squarely in the midst of Printing House Square. The Grundrisse is Marx's complex meditation on the intertwined fates of production, consumption and distribution, prefaced by these worries about the place of the aesthetic in the modern socioeconomic landscape. Within its novelistic form, Dracula too could be said to pose and to enact the occultation of those three processes, by its privileging of consumption, which subsumes the other two. This engorgement is staged by the collision of ancient mythologies with contemporary modes of production. Miss Mina Murray writes to Miss Lucy Westenra about her current preoccupations: "I have been working very hard lately, because I want to keep up with Jonathan's studies, and I have been practicing shorthand very assiduously. When we are married I shall be able to be very useful to Jonathan, and if I can stenograph well enough I can take down what he wants to say in this way and write it out for him on the typewriter, which I am also practicing very hard. He and I sometimes write letters in shorthand, and he is keeping a stenographic journal of his travels abroad. "2 While such girlish pursuits, if slavishly dutiful, scarcely seem ominous, it is Mina's very prowess with the typewriter that brings down Dracula on unsuspecting British necks, even including her very own. In what follows I want to propose that as radically different as the sexy act of vamping and such prosaic labor on the typewriter appear, there are underlying ties between them that can ultimately make sense of the oxymoron of vampiric typewriting. The argument will turn attention to the technologies that underpin vampirism, making for the dizzy contradictions of this book, and permitting it to be read as the first great modern novel in British literature. In