Dracula

Bram Stoker

Dec 1997 · Broadview Press

About this eBook

To borrow a phrase used by one of the characters in the novel, Dracula is “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.” In her introduction to this edition Glennis Byron first discusses the famous novel as an expression not of universal fears and desires, but of specifically late nineteenth-century concerns. And she discusses too the ways in which to the modern reader it is not Transylvania but London that is the location of the monstrosity in Dracula. The many appendices include contemporary reviews; source materials drawn on by Stoker; documents expressing contemporary views on trances, sleepwalking and hypnotism; and other relevant writing by Stoker, including “the censorship of Fiction,” in which he expresses his belief in the need to defend the social and moral purity of the nation.

About the author

Glennis Byron of the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, has edited the highly acclaimed anthology Nineteenth Century Stories by Women, and has written widely on nineteenth-century British literature.