The ancestral home of Bram Stoker's eponymous vampire count is located "in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe." Stoker's sensational novel constructs an Eastern European location based on folklore, Balkanist exotic myth-making and gothic stereotypes. In doing so, it portrays and contextualises what is possibly the least welcome immigrant figure in anglophone fiction, a supernatural intruder whose otherness transcends mere national borders.

In this paper, I will read Stoker's representation of Transylvania as a place which lies not only beyond the forest as its name suggests, but also beyond the laws of nature, thereby constituting a threatening periphery to Western European civilisation as represented by Britain. I plan to read the depiction and functionalisation of nature in Dracula in the context of imperialist discourses of natural spaces and heterotopia
Emneord: Faculty of Humanities: nature, Stoker, Bram, Dracula