Dracula: NEW RELEASE: unabridged with beautiful book cover

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Curran, Bob (2005). Vampires: A Field Guide to the Creatures That Stalk the Night. Career Press. ISBN 1-56414-807-6. Forget supernatural demons who turn into bats - those transfusions were the scariest shit in this entire book. Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. An epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, investigate, hunt and kill Dracula.

Ok, get this: Dracula had been sort of like a special needs zombie who was finally learning stuff - like math...and how to employ minions to carry his dirt around for him. Apparently, up to this point, he had just been harassing his neighbors and nibbling on Romanian women. This whole thing with Lucy & Mina was supposed to be his bid at going global. Spencer, Kathleen L. (1992). "Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis". ELH. 59 (1): 197–225. doi: 10.2307/2873424. ISSN 0013-8304. JSTOR 2873424. It is the testament to Bram Stoker's neatness that I could follow most of the story. And I'm in awe of his mind, which chronicles the entire story via journal entries (or phonograph recordings in the case of John Steward), all of which are dated. I don't mean outdated, but dated, day after day. And I mourned the death of Quincy Morris, gallant to the end, dying with a smile on his lips. The atmosphere of the novel is unmistakably gothic. It is impossible to talk about Dracula without mentioning the Gothic; the two are one and the same. The decaying castle in which the book begins is testimony to the eeriness that follows. The "damsel in distress" motif appears quite often in Gothic literature, and none so much as Dracula. Mina and Lucy are both damsels at some point, and even Harker himself can be seen as one at the start when he is rescued by his wife that has a “man’s brain.” It’s quite a subversion of the standard gender roles, at this point, and quite funny really.

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The novel's depiction of Slovaks and Romani people has attracted some, albeit limited, scholarly attention. [78] [j] Peter Arnds wrote that the Count's control over the Romani and his abduction of young children evokes real folk superstitions about Romani people stealing children, and that his ability to transform into a wolf is likewise related to xenophobic beliefs about the Romani as animalistic. [80] Although vagrants of all kinds were associated with animals, the Romani were victims of persecution in Europe due to a belief that they enjoyed "unclean meat" and lived among animals. [81] Stoker's description of the Slovaks draws heavily from a travel memoir by a British major. Unlike the major's description, Harker's description is overtly imperialistic, labelling the people as "barbarians" and their boats as "primitive", emphasising their perceived cultural inferiority. [82] Books to Read, and Others". Vanity Fair: A Weekly Show of Political, Social, and Literary Wares. London. 29 June 1897. p.80. Dracula (1992) is an acceptable adaptation, reasonably faithful to the original work, but with many deviations, none of them too bothersome. An out of this world cast including stars like Keanu, Wynona, Hopkins, Oldman and Elwes, that sadly didn’t amount to much. Not their best performance at all, and I especially disliked Sadie Frost as Lucy. Some none scripted scenes, awkward atmosphere and pacing, and honestly on the whole a little over the top. Not my favorite film at all; still, decent enough to watch, if only to complement the reading. The book definitely won this round. Milbank, Alison (1998). " 'Powers Old and New': Stoker's Alliances with Anglo-Irish Gothic". In Hughes, William; Smith, Andrew (eds.). Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic. Basingston: Macmillan Press. ISBN 978-1-349-26840-5. On initial inspection the plot of the book can be summed up in a few short sentences: Dracula wishes to create more vampires in Victorian London; his attempts are thwarted and he and his kind are exterminated. But, the novel is so much more than that. It represents Victorian fears and fancies; it is a comment on women’s position in society and underpins their sexual desires (and perhaps fears.) It suggests a struggle between modernity and science with religion and superstition. It harbours the effect of Darwinian thought on man as Dracula himself represent the idea of “survival of the fittest.” The undertones of sexuality and disease that occur so frequently symbolise the time in which it was written. Each one of these has been a topic for commentaries on Dracula, and academic essays.

Schaffer, Talia (1994). " "A Wilde Desire Took Me": the Homoerotic History of Dracula". ELH. 61 (2): 381–425. doi: 10.1353/elh.1994.0019. ISSN 1080-6547. S2CID 161888586. Miller 1996, p.2: "If Stoker knew as much about Vlad as some scholars claim (for example, that he impaled thousands of victims), then why is this information not used in the novel? This is a crucial question, when one considers how much insignificant detail Stoker did incorporate from his many sources."The girl with the man brain ( When most we want all her great brain which is trained like man’s brain, but is of sweet woman) is ignored and shut out after she helped them, and that the valiant men ignore all the signals, in an overly convenient fashion just to move the plot towards it's all too clearly set up climax.