The ominous Romanian landscape – a source of terror and distress in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight the way in which Bram Stoker chose to represent the Romanian landscape with a view to creating terror and conveying the sense of otherness to an area of wilderness and superstition. The representation of such a place is “embedded” in a novel where Transylvania no longer belongs to a real, but to an “imaginative geography”, standing for threat, menace and supernatural. The stylistic approach will bring to the fore the meanings attached to this land situated “beyond the forest”, on the very edge of Europe.