Something in the blood : the untold story of Bram Stoker, the man who wrote Dracula
Skal, David J.2017
Books, Manuscripts
Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with 'bad blood' that inform every page of 'Dracula'. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored though his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow self - a doppelganger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.
Main title:
Author:
Skal, David J., author
Edition:
First edition.
Imprint:
New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, [2017]
Collation:
xvii, 652 pages : illustrations (black and white, and colour) ; 23 cm
Notes:
Originally published: 2016.Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:
9781631493867 (pbk)
Dewey class:
823.8
Language:
English
BRN:
2587868
Bookmark link:
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