Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Tales by Bram Stoker (English) Paperback Book

Description: Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Tales by Bram Stoker, Kate Hebblethwaite A volume of short stories collected and published by the authors widow after his death. It explores the boundaries between life and death, known and unknown, animal and human, dream and reality. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description First time in Black Classics for more spooky and strange tales from one of the masters of horror fiction.Although Bram Stoker is best known for his world-famous novel Dracula, he also wrote many shorter works on the strange and the macabre. This collection, comprising Draculas Guest and Other Weird Stories, a volume of spine-chilling short stories collected and published by Stokers widow after his death, and The Lair of the White Worm, an intensely intriguing novel of myths, legends and unspeakable evil, demonstrate the full range of his horror writing. From the petrifying open tomb in Draculas Guest to the mental breakdown depicted in The Judges House and Crooken Sands, these terrifying tales of the uncanny explore the boundaries between life and death, known and unknown, animal and human, dream and reality. Notes First time in Black Classics for this collection of terrifying tales. A new introduction and critical notes are included. Author Biography Abraham "Bram" Stoker (1847-1912), Irish writer, best known for his vampire novel Dracula(1897). His other works include The Mystery of the Sea (1902), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), The Man (1905) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911).Kate Hebblethwaite is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. She whas published a number of articles on popular fiction authors of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Long Description Menacing tales from one of the masters of horror fiction Although Bram Stoker is best known for his world-famous novel "Dracula," he also wrote many shorter works on the strange and the macabre. Comprised of spine-chilling tales published by Stokers widow after his death, as well as "The Lair of the White Worm," an intensely intriguing novel of myths, legends, and unspeakable evils, this collection demonstrates the full range of Stokers horror writing. Excerpt from Book Extract from Draculas Guest and Other Weird Tales by Bram Stoker Introduction To many, Bram Stokers name has become synonymous with a single piece of work that, since its publication in 1897, has grown to typify the Victorian Gothic genre. Dracula, with its smorgasbord of sexual fantasies and social anxieties, has so far eclipsed anything else that he has written that, to the reader unaccustomed to Stokers oeuvre outside it, the extent and range of work that he produced will be somewhat surprising. Thirteen novels, two biographies, one play, one civil service manual and numerous lectures and short stories have all been overshadowed by a single vampire narrative. For a man who wrote so much, that so much should in turn be written about such a small section of his work is a paradox; Dracula remains at the forefront and the focus of both academic and popular interest. This concept of paradox is actually wholly appropriate to Stokers work. Despite Draculas longstanding popularity, its literary merits are less assured, Maud Ellmann arguing that the novel wouldnt be so good if it werent so very bad, whilst of his other works, most of them [were] execrable. In turn, in his introduction to the 1983 Oxford World Classics edition of Dracula, A. N. Wilson scoffed that, No one in their right mind would think of Stoker as "a great writer". Popular yet pulp, enduring yet unendurable -- the sense of discrepancy inherent in Stokers work is also applicable to the author himself; the volume of literature that has been produced about Stoker since the revival of his reputation in the early 1970s testifying, ironically, to his indecipherability. Since 1962 four full-length biographies have been written which, whilst illuminating the facts about Stokers life, nevertheless fail to get to grips with the man himself. There is very little material extant in which Stoker bares his innermost thoughts. As enigmatic as his most renowned creation, Stoker himself confessed in a letter to Walt Whitman in 1872 that, I...;am naturally secretive to the world. The bare facts about Stokers life have provided rich pickings for literary detective work, and critics have tended to read his works as much for the potential biographical insight they can offer as for the stories they tell. The most manifestly persistent of these critical interpretations has been speculation about his sexual proclivities. Claims have been equally stringently made for Stokers rampant heterosexual carnality, his closet homosexuality, his anal fixations, oral fixations, Oedipus complex, fear of assertive women (especially mothers) and domination fetishes. The most enduring mystery surrounding Bram Stokers life in this respect has been his death. Locomotor Ataxia, a stated cause of death on Stokers Death Certificate, was hailed as proof of the authors contraction of syphilis and thus womanizing reputation by Daniel Farson. Whilst this was rejected by Stokers third biographer, Barbara Belford, and similarly dismissed by Haining and Tremayne as unproven. Stokers most recent biographer, Paul Murray, has once more taken up the argument for his likely syphilitic condition, citing the authors stroke in 1906, his prescription for arsenic medication in 1910 and his stamping way of walking as evidence. The virtual impenetrability of Stoker himself and the excesses contained within his fiction lend themselves to this outpouring of biographical conjecture. William Hughes and Andrew Smith argue that Dracula has become the Freudian text par excellence, revealing a wide range of repressed sexual desires and concerns. Among other interpretations, the syphilitic condition here too has been raised, the novels preoccupation with insanity, pestilence and implicitly sexual contamination being cited as evidence of Stokers own sexual ill-health. To read novels solely for a glimpse of their biographical signposts, however, is to do both text and author a great disservice. Whilst fascinating in their own right as the last published works of Bram Stoker, the two hooks that comprise this volume, Draculas Guest and Other Weird Stories and The Lair of the White Worm also demonstrate that ultimately Stoker was a master of the Gothic genre, fully justifying his reputation alongside late-nineteenth-century greats such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle. Aside from the spine-chilling excellence of such stories as The Burial of the Rats, The Squaw and The Judges House, Stoker offset his tales of the weird and uncanny with an experimental outlook that not only responded to the social conscience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also tapped into contemporaneous experimental movements in art and literature. Far from the rather slapdash image that Stokers fiction beyond Dracula has generated, such works can be seen to be the product of deep thought, research and a profound understanding of the society in which he lived. The Lair of the White Worm, for example, widely dismissed as clearly the work of a man sick in mind if not in body, is, in reality, an intensely intriguing novel, working on mythic, historical, social and sexual levels, whilst also responding to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shifts in artistic expression. In short, Stoker was a popular fiction writer of significant aptitude, in tune with the undercurrents of the social thought and creative articulation of his time. Details ISBN0141441712 Author Kate Hebblethwaite Short Title DRACULAS GUEST & OTHER WEIRD S Series Penguin Classics Language English ISBN-10 0141441712 ISBN-13 9780141441719 Media Book Format Paperback Imprint Penguin Classics Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom Birth 1847 Death 1912 Tag pengblackclassics Residence ENK DOI 10.1604/9780141441719 UK Release Date 2006-10-26 Pages 464 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd Year 2006 Publication Date 2006-10-26 Alternative 9780141904924 DEWEY 823.8 Audience General NZ Release Date 2006-10-25 AU Release Date 2006-10-25 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:14686593;

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