“Reader, unbury him with a word”: The Revenant and/as Evil in Elizabeth Kostova’s ”The Historian”

Abstract

This research addresses the universal question of evil through an intertextual focus between Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a traditional Gothic production and its neo-Gothic counterpart, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Through investigating the relationship between two ensuing genres, it explores the understanding of human nature and its transformative capacity for evil in Gothic and neo-Gothic fiction, as well as protagonists’ need, temptation and failure to exorcise the Revenants of the past. With a theoretical framework supported by Jacques Derrida and his concept of hauntology, the present research further revolves around revealing how the monsters of the (neo-)Gothic fiction function as the manifestations of history itself by analysing the way the past haunts humanity’s present and future.