For more than a century, popular culture has looked eastward to the mountains of Transylvania in search of the origins of modern horror. Count Dracula is routinely presented as a Romanian monster inhabiting a Victorian nightmare: a foreign aristocrat who invades England and threatens the certainties of the British Empire.

Yet the deeper one…

For more than a century, James Joyce's Ulysses has occupied a near-sacred place in the literary canon. Yet its immense reputation raises an important question: has Joyce's masterpiece expanded the possibilities of fiction, or has its towering influence encouraged critics to prize complexity over connection, innovation over…