SOURCE: Castle, Gregory. “Ambivalence and Ascendancy in Bram Stoker's Dracula.” In Bram Stoker, Dracula: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by John Paul Riquelme, pp. 518-37. Boston: Bedford, 2002.

In the following essay, Castle utilizes a historical approach to Dracula, focusing on Anglo-Irish relations in the late nineteenth century.

Ascendancy in Decline

Historical approaches to literature have become increasingly appealing to many readers in the past two decades, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Irish studies, where revisionist writing about history and a literary criticism informed by new thinking about postcolonial situations have altered our way of looking at Irish culture and politics. It is within this context that we have seen a reconsideration of the relationship between the Anglo-Irish ruling class (the Irish Protestant Ascendancy) and the Catholic-Irish “natives.” In Heathcliff and the Great...