Dracula Transmedia: From Page to Experience. Expanding the 1897 Epistolary Novel through Faithful Transmedia Strategies

Resumen

This article focuses on the idea of advancing faithful transmedia expansion as a design-led methodology for restoring the structural and epistemic coherence of Dracula (1897). Over more than a century of adaptation, reproduction, and visual standardisation, Count Dracula has achieved extraordinary cultural visibility while progressively losing the documentary architecture that organizes Bram Stoker’s novel. Rather than treating this loss as a secondary consequence of popularization, the article argues that the recurrent fragmentation of Dracula across film, theatre, advertising, editorial design, and merchandising results from the displacement of the novel’s underlying informational system: its coordinated assemblage of diaries, letters, telegrams, phonographic recordings, memoranda, and newspaper clippings. The study proposes that Dracula should not be read as a source text for adaptation but as a distributed media system whose coherence depends on the interaction of differentiated documentary forms – anticipating key principles later associated with transmedia organisation and media convergence . Drawing on transmedia theory, remediation, media archaeology, and designerly ways of knowing, the article develops a framework in which design operates as a form of curatorial mediation between source text, material culture, and contemporary platforms. Within this framework, fidelity is understood not as literal replication of surface features but as the preservation of structural relations, epistemic functions, and ontological continuity – allowing the article to distinguish reconstruction from reinterpretation and restoration from substitution. Through the case study of Dracula Legacy, it demonstrates how editorial systems, narrative artefacts, and temporal serialisation can function as instruments of literary archaeology, proposing faithful transmedia expansion as a transferable methodology for re-engaging works whose structural integrity has been obscured by a long history of adaptation and iconographic drift