Balkan Dracula. A British Conjectural Reading of the Eastern Question through a Conceptual History Lens
Balkan Dracula. A British Conjectural Reading of the Eastern Question through a Conceptual History Lens

Summary/Abstract: The author sets out to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula in relation to the nineteenth-century Eastern Question, a context largely overlooked in existing scholarship. It claims conjecturally that Stoker’s Conservative politics and contemporary British debates over the declining Ottoman Empire may have shaped the novel’s geopolitical imagination, even without explicit references in the text. Building on and reassessing Gibson’s claim that Dracula tacitly justifies Ottoman rule in the Balkans, the paper situates Stoker within a longer English Conservative tradition that viewed Ottoman hegemony favourably. It introduces the concept of sensus communis to describe the Balkans as a region historically unified by overlapping imperial structures, later fragmented by modern nationalism. Overall, the study reframes the Eastern Question not merely as a geopolitical conflict but as a struggle over memory and historical consciousness, drawing on theories of historical time and collective memory to reinterpret Balkan history and Stoker’s novel. The core argument is that while Balkan peoples shared the same institutional and cultural realities for centuries shaped by imperial legacies, the rise of modern nationalism fragmented how those experiences are remembered. By applying the theories of Reinhart Koselleck and Victor Neumann, the author reframes the “Eastern Question” as a crisis of conflicting memories and historical timing rather than just a simple geopolitical struggle.

• Details
• Contents