Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage [Hardcover]

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage re-appraises Stoker's key fictions in relation to his working life. It takes Stoker's work from the margins to centre stage, exploring how Victorian theatre's melodramatic and Gothic productions influenced his writing and thinking.Introduction: Setting the Scene 1. Stoker, Melodrama and the Gothic 2. Irving's Tempters and Stoker's Vanishing Ladies: Supernatural Production, Mesmeric Influence and Magical Illusion 3. Ellen Terry and the 'Bloofer Lady': Femininity and Fallenness 4. Gothic Weddings and Performing Vampires: Genevi?ve Ward and The Lady of the Shroud 5. The Lyceum's Macbeth and Stoker's Dracula Conclusion

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage does an admirable job of placing Dracula in conversation with the literary Gothic, supernatural Gothic, and melodramatic drama on offer at Irving's Lyceum Royal Theatre. It also situates the novel in relation to the function of science, literature, and the theatre in legitimixing brutality towards women as a means of rehabilitating them. - Victorian Periodicals Review, 2015

Catherine Wynne is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, UK. She is editor of Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays and Fiction (2012), author of The Colonial Conan Doyle (2002) and co-editor (with Sabine Vanacker) of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multi-Media Afterlives (2012).