Wednesday, May 12, 2010

The Dead Un-Dead was one of Stoker's original titles for Dracula

05/12/10   Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula .It was first published as a hardcover in 1897 by Archibald Constable and Co.The novel is mainly composed of journal entries and letters written by several narrators.The tale begins with Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified English solicitor, journeying by train and carriage from England to Count Dracula's  remote castle  in the Carpathian Mountains on the border of Transylvania, Bukovina and Moldavia.The purpose of his mission is to provide legal support to Dracula for a real estate transaction overseen by Harker's employer, Peter Hawkins, of Exeter in England.Harker soon discovers that he has become a prisoner in the castle,
Harker barely escapes from the castle with his life.
 Soon Dracula is tracking Harker's  fiancée.Before writing Dracula, Stoker spent seven years researching
European folklore and stories of vampires,Though the most famous vampire novel ever, Dracula was not the first. It was preceded and partly inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 "Carmilla", about a lesbian vampire who preys on a lonely young woman.It has been suggested that Stoker was influenced by the history of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who was born in the Kingdom of Hungary. Bathory is suspected to have tortured and killed anywhere between 36 and 700 young women over a period of many years,and it was commonly believed that she committed these crimes in order to bathe in or drink their blood, believing that this preserved her youth.
In 1914, two years after Stoker's death,
the short story "Dracula's Guest"   
was posthumously published. It was,
the deleted first (or second)
chapter from the original manuscript.

DNA Stain

1 comment:

  1. And, Jud, it has never been outta print since it was published in 1897. I used to booktalk it.
    Cool post.

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