Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula by
Here was a six-foot-two Irishman with a red beard -- a Victorian family man, a spirited debater, and the author of novels and short stories largely forgotten today. All, of course, except for Dracula, which has enjoyed countless stage and screen incarnations and transformations and haunted the dreams of many generations. Bram Stoker lived at the very center of late-Victorian social and artistic life and numbered among his friends Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Whistler, Gladstone, and Tennyson. But it was his relationship with the mesmerizing, domineering actor Henry Irving that may have played the most crucial role in Stoker's life -- a real-life monster who ultimately led to Stoker's most famous creation. In this book that the Baltimore Sun called "superb, " Barbara Belford draws on unpublished archival material to reveal the links between the reticent author's life, his vampire tale, and the political, occult, cultural, and sexual background of the 1890's.
Bram Stoker by
In part because of the huge success of his novel Dracula, Bram Stoker is largely responsible for moving the Gothic out of medieval castles and into the center of modern life, using gothic motifs and conventions to examine social, economic, and political problems. During his lifetime, Stoker authored seventeen books in addition to Dracula, as well as several short stories, many of which were not classically gothic. In Bram Stoker, Carol A. Senf offers a detailed and accessible introduction to the entirety of Stoker's oeuvre, focusing on his contributions to the modern notion of the Gothic.
Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula by
A groundbreaking biography reveals the haunted origins of the man who created Dracula and traces the psychosexual contours of late Victorian society. Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary undead Count, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in this psychological and cultural portrait, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralyzed as a boy, and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad blood" that informs every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintance and romantic rival, Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow side--a doppelgänger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his slavish adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving are examined in splendidly gothic detail.
The Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker by
Presented here, for the first time since their publication over a century ago, are twelve previously unknown published works of fiction, poetry, and journalistic writing by Bram Stoker (1847-1912), three works never before reprinted, twelve period writings about Stoker, and the rare 1913 estate sale catalogue of his personal library.
Bram Stoker: A Literary Life by
This book charts the major events of Stoker's life, including friendships with many of the major figures of the age and as manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum, with his literary career. It offers critical evaluation of Dracula and of Stoker's lesser-known works, yielding much interest when reinserted into their original cultural contexts.
Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker's Fiction and its Cultural Context by
Beyond Dracula represents an important critical departure from the customary psychoanalytical approach to the writings of Bram Stoker. Reading Stoker as a participant in Victorian and Edwardian cultural life, the volume examines the breadth of Stoker's novel-length fiction, as well as his journalism, biographical writings and short fiction. In its considerations of questions of religion, censorship, gender and medicine, the volume will interest not merely readers of the Gothic but those involved in the study of Victorian and Edwardian culture.
Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic by
Stoker is best remembered today as the author of Dracula . However, as the twelve essays in this volume demonstrate, Stoker's work blends the Gothic with the discourses of politics, sexuality, medicine and national identity to produce texts that may be read by a variety of critical methodologies. Following an Introduction that analyses how Stoker's writings have been critically received in the twentieth century, the book addresses not merely Dracula but also the author's other writings through historicism, psychology and genre.
In the World of Vlad: The Lives and Times of a Warlord by
The life (in fact the lives) of Vlad III "the Impaller“ or "Dracula“ is a Rorschach test. Everybody sees what they want to see in the “documentary stains”. And these “stains” are expanding. Based on research in the archives and libraries of Budapest, Dubrovnik, Genoa, Mantua, Milan, Modena, Munich, Rome, Venice and Vienna, the book focuses on the conflictive medieval, and modern images created by the clash between the classical pictures of Vlad and the still preserved coeval sources.
Dracula's Guest: And Other Stories by
Some literary historians believe that Dracula's Guest is an excerpt excised from the original manuscript of Bram Stoker's masterpiece Dracula by an overzealous editor. This short novel recounts the travels of an unnamed Englishman who crosses paths with a foreboding wolf-like creature on his way to Count Dracula's castle. The story is currently being developed into a television series that is slated to air on the CW network in 2010. A must-read for lovers of vampire lit. This edition also includes these short stories: The Judge's House, The Squaw, The Secret of the Growing Gold, The Gipsy Prophecy, The Coming of Abel Behenna, The Burial of the Rats, A Dream of Red Hands and Crooken Sands.
Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage by
Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage re-appraises Stoker's key fictions in relation to his working life. It takes Stoker's work from the margins to centre stage, exploring how Victorian theatre's melodramatic and Gothic productions influenced his writing and thinking.
Evangelical Gothic: The English Novel and the Religious War on Virtue from Wesley to Dracula by
Evangelical Gothic explores the bitter antagonism that prevailed between two defining institutions of nineteenth-century Britain: Evangelicalism and the popular novel. Christopher Herbert begins by retrieving from near oblivion a rich anti-Evangelical polemical literature in which the great religious revival, often lauded in later scholarship as a "moral revolution," is depicted as an evil conspiracy centered on the attempted dismantling of the humanitarian moral culture of the nation. Examining foundational Evangelical writings by John Wesley and William Wilberforce alongside novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, and others, Herbert contends that the realistic popular novel of the time was constitutionally alien to Evangelical ideology and even, to some extent, took its opposition to that ideology as its core function. This provocative argument illuminates the frequent linkage of Evangelicalism in nineteenth-century fiction with the characteristic imagery of the Gothic-with black magic, with themes of demonic visitation and vampirism, and with a distinctive mood of hysteria and panic.
Haunted Europe: Continental Connections in English-Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media by
Haunted Europe offers the first comprehensive account of the British and Irish fascination with a Gothic vision of continental Europe, tracing its effect on British intellectual life from the birth of the Gothic novel, to the eve of Brexit, and the symbolic recalibration of the UK's relationship to mainland Europe. By focusing on the development of the relationship between Britain and Ireland and continental Europe over more than two-hundred years, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to focus on a narrow time-period and have missed continuities and discontinuities in our ongoing relationship with the mainland.
The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction by
Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. In this volume, fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called 'Gothic story') to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between 'high' and 'popular' culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.
Vlad III Dracula: The Life and Times of the Historical Dracula by
The fifteenth-century Romanian Prince Vlad III Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler, is among the most intriguing personalities in medieval history. Already during his lifetime, his true story became obscured by a veil of myths. As a result, he has been portrayed both as a bloody tyrant -- who degenerated down throughout the centuries into the fictional vampire of the same name created by Bram Stoker at the end of the nineteenth century -- and as a national and Christian hero who fought bravely to defend his native land and all of Europe against the invading Turkish infidels. Even in recent times, communist and nationalist historiography has continued to obscure the real history of Dracula. This book, widely regarded as the authoritative biography of the historical Dracula, presents the life and times of this remarkable personality of medieval Europe. The author uses all extant Romanian, Turkish, Russian, and German sources in reconstructing the history of this famous prince. Despite his short reign, Vlad created a name for himself both in the history of his own country and in world history. A portrait of the historical Dracula emerges, providing the reader with a better understanding of this enigmatic figure of medieval history and the times in which he lived. The author also discusses the development of the Dracula myth. Translations of key documents in the appendixes and a series of original illustrations by Romanian artist Octavian Ion Penda enhance this biography of the historical Dracula.
In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends by
The true story behind the legend of Dracula - a biography of Prince Vlad of Transylvania, better known as Vlad the Impaler.