Something in the Blood

Descriere

"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.