Representing Transylvania and Banat in vampire fiction: Speculative and speculated geographies in Dracula and Vampirul.

Abstract

This article examines the representation of places within Romania in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Vampirul (1938), the first Romanian vampire novel, by G. M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu. Through a comparative reading, our study introduces the concept of “speculated geography” to describe how the imported Gothic trope of the vampire was locally reconfigured. If Stoker’s portrayal of Transylvania is a form of speculative geography—a fictionalized, exoticized Romanian region shaped by Western bias and second-hand travel accounts—Amza and Bilciurescu’s Vampirul enacts a speculated geography of Banat, a real Romanian region reframed through the authors’ familiarity with the region, the period’s vampire cinema, and the socio-political anxieties of interwar Romania. The article argues that Vampirul reconfigures the imported vampire myth into a local critique of ethnic hierarchies, industrial modernity, and post-imperial nationhood.