Skal has been chasing Dracula for more than a quarter-century, since his 1990 debut, Hollywood Gothic, a chronicle of the villain's evolution from an animalistic literary monster to a debonair screen star. He's written a biography of Tod Browning, director of the original movie, and co-edited an annotated version of the novel. His command of the material combined with his gifts as a storyteller manage to make this an authoritative book without a dull moment, its wandering narrative always returning to the shadowy corners of Victorian sexuality.
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.
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Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula
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.
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Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula
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Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula
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Product Details
BN ID: | 2940171332617 |
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Publisher: | HighBridge Company |
Publication date: | 10/04/2016 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
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