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Title details for Something in the Blood by David J. Skal - Available

Something in the Blood

by David J. Skal
James Patrick Cronin
Audiobook
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Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary undead Count, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in this 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 informs every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintance and romantic rival, Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow side?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 splendidly gothic detail.
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Publisher: HighBridge Edition: Unabridged
Awards:

OverDrive Listen audiobook

  • ISBN: 9781681682532
  • File size: 614259 KB
  • Release date: October 4, 2016
  • Duration: 21:19:42

MP3 audiobook

  • ISBN: 9781681682532
  • File size: 614297 KB
  • Release date: October 4, 2016
  • Duration: 21:31:33
  • Number of parts: 26
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Formats

OverDrive Listen audiobook
MP3 audiobook

subjects

Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction

Languages

English

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary undead Count, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in this 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 informs every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintance and romantic rival, Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow side?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 splendidly gothic detail.
Expand title description text
Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction