A Study Of Narrative Space To The Gothic Novel-Dracula

Bram Stoker is an Irish writer, born in Dublin. Stoker is known to the world as writing vampire story, and now all of the vampire archetypes almost are born out of his story, from Dracula to Miss Betty, or from Queen of the Damned to John Carpenter’s Vampires Vampire, whose stories are built on the basis of the book. And each film caused a sensation in Hollywood and even around the world. Dracula which Stoker created has become synonymous with the vampire. On space narrative research Joseph Frank for the first time put forward the concept of spatial form in 1945, which marked the beginning of the space narrative theory, and which has continued for nearly 70 years. Recently, the research of space narrative in the Chinese and foreign scholars have emerged a lot of researchers. Specially, Long Diyong’s "space narrative research" has made outstanding contributions as the research. The concept spatial form which was put forward by Joseph Frank introduced another spatial concept: juxtaposition. It refers to various images and hints or symbol and contact, which are placed freely outside the narrative process in parallelism to make them obtain continuous reference and cross-reference in the text so as to form a whole. At the same time, this paper also relates to the psychological space. Psychologist Lewin described the incident as a psychological mental space with target from one area to another area of the mobile. He believes that "psychological phenomenon seems to be the natural phenomena of physical space, which is a kind of spatial event. So the person’s mental world can also be considered to be composed of several areas and spaces, which express different performance of personal matters and real things. And psychological space embodies the personal relationships in a certain time and space, which is the people’s mental living space. The innovation of this paper is to use Lefebvre’s theory of physical space narrative to analyze the book Dracula. The writer makes the use of physical space promoting the process of the story to solidified time variation, which has become a symbol in the memory. Finally, through literature analysis, the writer reveals the purpose of the theme in the work.This thesis consists of three parts: the introduction, the main body and the conclusion. The introduction part can be subdivided into the introduction of the writer and the works, the literature review and the thesis overview. The introduction of the writer and the works gives a brief account of Bram Stoker and his novel Dracula. The literature review reviews Chinese and foreign critics and comment on Stoker and his work Dracula over the past few decades, which illustrates the significance of this thesis. The thesis overview introduces the framework of the comprehensive action and the content of each part. This paper is divided into four chapters. The first chapter mainly introduces the development and background of the space narrative theory as well as its main content. The second chapter mainly analyzes Stoker’s Dracula on the narrative process and the time mark in the space narrative theory. The third chapter selects the mental space theory to analyze the characters’ the complex emotions in the story, and here the writer also put forward to the writing style of stream of consciousness. The fourth chapter is the spatial form proposed by Joseph Frank. The author analyzes the relationship between space time and the various narration to reveal metaphors in the works by analyzing the spatial form in the works. The application of these techniques make the whole novel’s plot be interrupted several times, and the time has been slowed down to highlight the space effect of the novel.