Synopsis A bestseller in Britain when it was published in 1897, Bram Stoker's classic novel of suspense and horror introduced a character that would become an icon of Victorian horror. Stoker structured his novel as a series of correspondences--between English solicitor Jonathan Harker who's been sent to Dracula's Transylvania and his devoted fiancée Mina Murray, as well as the log of a captain transporting a cargo of mysterious sand and earthen boxes. Dracula's power and evil influence spreads and grows. A late 20th-century biographer of Stoker has suggested that famed actor Henry Irving, for whom Stoker worked for many years, was an inspiration for some of Count Dracula's characteristics, but whatever the impetus, Stoker tapped into a major cultural central artery and the teeth marks have been following ever since.
After discovering the double identity of the wealthy Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula, a small group of people vow to rid the world of the evil vampire. Illustrated notes throughout the text explain the historical background of the story.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-11-01 | | Series: | Broadview Literary Texts Series |
| Size | | Length: | 493 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 20.0 oz |
Publisher's Note A popular bestseller in Victorian England, Stoker's hypnotic tale of the bloodthirsty Count Dracula, whose nocturnal atrocities are symbolic of an evil ages old yet forever new, endures as the quintessential story of suspense and horror. The unbridled lusts and desires, the diabolical cravings that Stoker dramatized with such mythical force, render Dracula resonant and unsettling a century later.
Industry Reviews "I think it is the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years. It is really wonderful how with so much exciting interest over so long a book there is never an anticlimax." Book jacket - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"...it is splendid. A thousand miles beyond anything you have written before, and I feel certain will place you very high in the writers of the day--the story and style being deeply sensational, exciting and interesting. No book since Mrs. Shelley's 'Frankenstein' or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality or terror--Poe is nowhere. I have read much but I never met a book like it at all. In its terrible excitement it should make a widespread reputation and much money for you." Letter to author - Charlotte Stoker
"It is a story of a vampire, the old medieval vampire but recrudescent today...the book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to cleanse the mind by pity and terror. At any rate there is nothing base in the book, and though superstition is fought with the weapons of superstition, I hope it is not irreverent." Letter to William Gladstone - Bram Stoker
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