Bram Stoker

Centenary Essays

Jarlath Killeen

• Publisher: Four Courts Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781846824456
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Despite his vampire creation, Dracula, being world-famous, and in spite of a host of academic studies of the novel in which this vampire first appeared, Bram Stoker himself remains a figure shrouded in darkness, and his other writings are virtually unknown and ignored. This collection addresses this large gap. The main aim of the collection is to read Stoker in the round, expanding the critical focus away from an exclusive obsession with Dracula and taking account of the full extent of Stoker's writing, from his other Gothic novels, The Lair of the White Worm and The Snake's Pass, to his short stories and journalism, and his romances Miss Betty, Lady Athlyne, and The Shoulder of Shasta. Where Dracula is considered, new scholarship is presented by the leading experts on that novel. The collection assesses Stoker's relationship to late 19th-century Ireland and especially Dublin, and addresses his status as an 'Irish' writer of substance. [Subject: Literary Criticism, History, Victorian Studies]

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: remembering Bram Stoker
• 1. Bram Stoker: the child that went with the fairies
• 2. Bram Stoker: the facts and the fictions
• 3. Bram Stoker: a man of notes
• 4. Bram Stoker: Ireland and beyond
• 5. The shoulder of Shasta: Bram Stoker’s California romance
• 6. ‘Rumours of the Great Plague’: medicine, mythology and the memory of the Sligo cholera in Bram Stoker’s Under the sunset
• 7. ‘The sport of opposite forces’: Bram Stoker’s generational anxiety
• 8. ‘See how the bog can preserve’: bogs, snakes and Irish stereotypes in The snake’s pass
• 9. The lair of the white worm; or, what became of Bram Stoker?
• 10. Mr Stoker’s holiday
• Index