Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula - Couverture souple

Skal, David J.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1631493868 ISBN 13 : 9781631493867

Editeur : Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

"Dracula and his spawn will live on forever, it would seem, making money for many. Let's hope David J. Skal is among them, in return for his consistently entertaining, sumptuously illustrated ramble through Stokerism." The Spectator

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary Count Dracula, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in a 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 inform every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong 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 passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his slavish adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.

Revue de presse :

"Analytically, Skal is at his best when pointing out the striking resemblances between Dracula and that other portrait of the defiance of decay and death, The Picture of Dorian Gray...the biography makes many fascinating connections." --The Sunday Times

"...immersed in the lore of his subject, Skal proves to be an ideal guide: lithe, witty, eager to theorize...He is surely successful in his efforts to revivify his subject and to reveal that even those shadows we think we know may contain obscurities that move of their own volition and which, tantalizingly, remain just out of sight." --Times Literary Supplement

"Skal's 'untold story' is an exercise in literary sleuthing, reading back from the fiction to uncover the motives of its making."

--Literary Review

"Skal's biography puts forward the best version of the psychosexual reading of the life and work I have encountered - and I've read most of the available critical and biographical studies of Stoker."

--Jarlath Killeen, The Wildean

"...[a] highly digestible feast."

--SFX Magazine

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Liveright Publishing Corporation
• Date d'édition: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1631493868
• ISBN 13: 9781631493867
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 672