Winner of the 1997 International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Best Non-fiction Book
In 1897, Archibald Constable & Company published a novel by the unheralded Bram Stoker. That novel, Dracula, has gone on to become perhaps the most influential novel of all time. To commemorate the centennial of that great novel, Carol Margaret Davison has brought together this collection of essays by some of the world’s leading scholars. The essays analyze Stoker’s original novel and celebrate its legacy in popular culture. The continuing presence of Dracula and vampire fiction and films provides proof that, as Davison writes, Dracula is ‚alive and sucking.‘
‚Dracula is a Gothic mandala, a vast design in which multiple reflections of the elements of the genre are configured in elegant sets of symmetries. It is also a sort of lens, bringing focus and compression to diverse Gothic motifs, including not only vampirism but madness, the night, spoiled innocence, disorder in nature, sacrilege, cannibalism, necrophilia, psychic projection, the succubus, the incubus, the ruin, and the tomb. Gathering up and unifying all that came before it, and casting its great shadow over all that came and continues to come after, its influence on twentieth-century Gothic fiction and film is unique and irresistible.‘
from the Preface by Patrick Mc Grath
Über den Autor
Paul Simpson-Housley was born in Derbyshire, United Kingdom. He has taught university in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and Chile. Currently he is director of graduate geography and associate professor at York University. His published books include Sacred Places and Profane Spaces: The Geographics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines, and The Psychology of Geographical Hazards.