Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World [Paperback]

This collection places the fiction of Bram Stoker in relation to this life, career and status as a late Victorian. It centres on various aspects of his interests and career, such as politics, the legal system, his role as Irving's stage manager, and analyses his work in relation to these.While Bram Stoker's fiction has been analysed the aim of this volume is to place Stoker's fiction in the context of his life and of his work, and the period in which he lived. As well as being the author of Dracula, he was also Acting Manager of the Lyceum Theatre, a qualified barrister, a theatre reviewer, and for the earliest part of his career a civil servant in Dublin. His work and enthusiasms took him into contact with many other areas of life, including politics and the visual arts, and his voracious appetite for reading give him an immense breadth of knowledge which informs his novels as well. Divided into three sets of three essays, the major subdivisions of this collection are Professions, Science and Technology, and Politics. In the first three essays, we have discussions of Stoker's relationship with the legal system, the visual and scenic arts, and his role as Acting Manager at the Lyceum Theatre. The second section on Science has pieces on the use of Utopian and Dystopian technology in Dracula, the importance of the emerging profession of coroner to the same novel, and the importance of ecology to his fiction. The final Section, Politics, details Stoker's attitudes towards the aristocracy, the frontiersman and global politics, as revealed through his novels. Much of the pleasure and strength of this collection is in the range of Stoker's works analyzed... Readers familiar with Stoker will find this volume filled with discussions both familiar and new that will have a positive impact on Stoker studies.
Robert Finnigan, Victorian Review

[Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World] has sustaining pockets of original research that make it a positive contribution tolãT