Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage

Abstract

This series of gothic books is the first to treat the genre in its many inter-related, global and 'extended' cultural aspects to show how the taste for the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for terror and horror and how that taste became not only international (with a huge fan base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the sensibility of the modern age, changing our attitudes to such diverse areas as the nature of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the concept of the self. The series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing kept to a minimum and theory contextualised where possible. All the books are readable by an intelligent student or a knowledgeable general reader interested in the subject.

Victorian Alchemy

“…73. 'John Nevil Maskelyne … commenced his career by reproducing the Davenport cabinet and staging it as an illusion ';Wynne 2013, 41-2. 74.…”

Victorian Melodrama

“…If melodrama was the most prominent aesthetic form in the Victorian period, it is hardly surprising that critics locate it in a number of novelistic contexts. In Stoker, Dracula, and the Victorian Gothic Stage (2013), Catherine Wynne argues that Stoker's fiction was influenced by various melodramatic contexts, not least the Lyceum's ‘Gothic culture’ (10) and Irving's melodramatic productions (Stoker, we recall, was Irving's business manager at the Lyceum). In ‘The Female Witness and the Melodramatic Mode in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton ’ (2013), Alison Moulds argues that the court scene in Gaskell's novel is a melodramatic set piece which blurs the boundary between the gendered private and public spheres.…”