19세기말의 장기 공황과『드라큘라』의 정보자본주의: 정보조직의 기술화와 단행본 서사의 재탄생

Abstract

This paper proposes that the novel Dracula (1896) should be read as a response to the Long Depression that began in 1873 and ended in 1896, which contributed to the establishment of the so-called early Information Age geared by the capital's labor management innovation. It focuses especially on the format of the novel as a single-volume publication without any prior serialization: an innovative practice that departed from the then standard format of three-volume publications for the circulating library with serialization in monthly magazines. Such an innovation in the publishing industry was a part of the self-renewal of the industries under the pressure of the Depression. Bram Stoker, a manager of the middle-brow Lyceum Theatre and a hack author under the old system, inclined to the innovation and welcomed the new practice. Dracula is a story of the fight against the Long Depression by the middle class in crisis, who actively adopts the information technology to be competitive. It is a story of the early Information Age not just in that the increasingly popularized typewriter appears as the crucial medium to reveal the truth of Dracula: the Depression as a mixture of the rational and the irrational of capitalism. The novel also reflects the mechanism of Information Capitalism, since the value of the information created by the labor of cognition, communication and co-operation of plural agents, especially through the labor of the woman Mina Murray, is appropriated by one person in the making of the novel’s single-volume form. It is the editor of the story - supposedly the declared author of the book's postscript, Jonathan Harker, Mina's lawyer husband - who has the final authority over the narrative. He, not unlike Stoker, represents the patriarchal middle class that came to join successfully the reinforced capitalist force of the British Empire after the Depression, which was overcome with the aid of the information technology developed in order to manage labor.