Bram Stoker

Most famous for his much-filmed novel Dracula, Bram Stoker was nonetheless a prolific writer. This accessible book offers an introduction to a range of his work – novels, short stories, biography, and criticism. It provides a discussion of recent scholarship on Stoker including the many attempts to write his life and find the ‘real’ Bram Stoker, and the lurid speculation this provokes. Moving beyond this, the author focuses on Stoker’s career as a late-Victorian and Edwardian novelist in the commercial marketplace, looking at the fictional trends – horror, romance, adventure, crime – which his work encompasses. The study discusses Stoker’s bid for fame as a writer, how his novels were received, and their engagement with contemporary anxieties about gender and nationhood.