Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson 1986), treats Dracula under the heading of Big House novels, calling it the ‘most hysterical and popular development’ of the ruined house genre of which Le Fanu was the great Victorian master. He paraphrases: The living dead of the aristocratic vampire’s tribe are victims of an historical crime from which the very bourgeois living - like Mina Harkness [recte Harker], the heroine - must be released by a joint Anglo-American assault, fortified by ‘the wonderful power of money’. He comments: ‘This was the power which the Anglo-Irish landowners and the middle classes sadly lacked […]caught in a historical crisis from which there was no escape.’ (p.205.)

‘Dracula’s dwindling soil and his vampiric appetites consort well enough with the image of the Irish landlord current in the nineteenth century. Running out of soil, this peculiar version of the absentee landlord in London will flee the light of day and be consigned to the only territory left to him, that of legend. Like O’Grady’s and Yeats’s Anglo-Irish, he will be expelled from history to enter the never-never land of myth, demonised more effectively but also more clandestinely than by a Lalor, Mitchel, or Davitt. (‘Landlord and Soil: Dracula’, in ‘National Character and the Character of Nations’, in Strange Country, pp.89-94; p.90.)

Andrew Parkin, ‘Shadows of Destruction: The Big House in Contemporary Irish Fiction’ in Michael Kenneally, ed., Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), pp.306-354, espec. pp.307-08: ‘The rhythms of the Count are that of an Irish speaker of English rather than a European one; they fit with the image of Dracula as a nobleman with a ‘Gothic’ castle, and a country house, as well as a London town house to which he periodically withdraws.’ (Cited in Colin Graham, ‘A Late Politics of Irish Gothic: Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud’, in Transactions of the Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998.)

Terry Eagleton: Protestant Gothic […] is the political unconscious of Irish [sic] society, the place where its fears and fantasies most luridly emerge. […] For Gothic is the nightmare of the besieged and reviled, most notably of (‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, in Mary Massoud, ed., Literary Relations: Ireland, Egypt and the Far East (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1996), pp.135-46, p.140.)

[cont.] Like them [i.e., the Anglo-Irish landlords], Dracula is literally running out of land; by the end of the novel he is being hotly pursued around Europe, furnished only with the crates of Transylvanian soil he needs to bed down in for the night. His material base, like that of his author’s, is rapidly dwindling, and once deprived of his earth he will die Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 1995, p.215 [italics mine].)

Dracula is a material ghoul, much preoccupied with leases and tide deeds, and has summoned the narrator Jonathan Harker to his Gothic fastness less to bite him in the neck than to discuss his legal affairs. When he is slashed with a knife, it is banknotes and gold coins rather than blood which cascade from his breast. But Dracula, like the Ascendancy, is running out of land […]. (Idem.)

Chris Morash, ‘“Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition”: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic’: ‘But the past is certainly not dead. Instead, the deeply disturbing recognition that Fenians and Landlords could exist at the same time as the typewriter, the telegraph and the railway generate a series of texts at whose core is an anxiety that the natural progress of civilsation is riddled with an unnatural survival of the past in the present.’ (In Brian Cosgrove, ed., Literature and the Supernatural [Essays for the Maynooth Bicentenary], Columbia Press 1995, pp.95-118, p.109.)