Read more
List of contents
List of Illustrations
About This Edition
Introduction
Table of Dates
Dracula (1897)
Appendix: “Dracula’s Guest”
Contexts
Victorian Reviews of Dracula
The Athenaeum
Belfast News-Letter
The Bookman
Daily News
The Era
Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser
Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
National Magazine
New York Tribune
Pall Mall Gazette
The Spectator
Times (London)
Times (Washington)
Eastern Europe
Charles Boner, from Transylvania: Its Products and its People
Edmund Cecil Johnson, from On the Track of the Crescent: Erratic Notes from Piraeus to Pesth
Emily Gerard, from “Transylvanian Superstitions”
Gender
[Anon.], from “The Age of Woman”
Sarah Grand. From “The Modern Girl”
Science
Max Nordau, from Degeneration.
Havelock Ellis, from The Criminal
Daniel Hack Tuke, from Sleep-Walking and Hypnotism
William Aitken, from The Science and Practice of Medicine
Media
James L. Andem, from A Practical Guide to the Use of the Edison Phonograph
C. L. McCluer Stevens, from “The Evolution of the Typewriter”
Thomas Allen Reed, from A Biography of Isaac Pitman (Inventor of Phonography)
Works Cited in the Notes
Further Reading and Viewing
About the author
Andrew Elfenbein is the Morse-Alumni Distinguish Teaching Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He works on 18th- and 19th-century British literature, gender and sexuality studies, the history of English, and cognitive approaches to reading.
Summary
From Longman's Cultural Edition series, this new edition of Dracula, edited by Andrew Elfenbein, recovers the cultural complexity of Bram Stoker's novel and offers a wide array of contextualizing documents, including contemporary reviews and articles about Eastern Europe, science, gender, and media. Rather than tracing Dracula through all his later incarnations, this edition offers ways to understand the late Victorian origins of Bram Stoker’s remarkable book. While Dracula never simply reflects contemporary trends, reading it with knowledge of contemporary events and debates can clarify what may otherwise seem puzzling. Throughout, Stoker emphasizes that his vampire story takes place not in a hazy, fictional past, but in a sharply realized England of the 1890s. The materials in the sections of Cultural Contexts illuminate the references to Victorian culture in Stoker’s version of this seemingly timeless story.
