Dracula - Stoker, Bram

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Résumé :
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he marks horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England: an unmanned ship is wrecked. strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck. and a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his Master. In the ensuing battle of wits between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries, Bram Stoker created a masterpiece of the horror genre, probing into questions of identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire. For this completely updated edition, Maurice Hindle has revised his introduction, list of further reading and notes, and added two appendices: Stoker's essay on censorship and his interview with Winston Churchill, both published in 1908. Christopher Frayling's preface discusses Stoker's significance and the influences that contributed to his creation of the Dracula myth.

Biographie:
Bram (Abraham) Stoker (1847-1912) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. He overcame an incapacitating childhood illness to attend Trinity College, Dublin, where he distinguished himself in athletics, became president of both Philosophical and Historical Societies and graduated in Pure Mathematics. From 1870 to 1877 he worked as a civil servant in Dublin Castle and published The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879). During this period he wrote dramatic criticism, and in 1878 his strong admiration for Henry Irving led the actor to appoint him acting and business manager at London's Lyceum Theatre, an experience that produced Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906). Stoker wrote short stories and novels, a lecture in praise of America, and the amusing Famous Imposters (1910). Few of Stoker's works, which include The Mystery of the Sea (1902) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), are now read, except for his very successful Dracula (1897), a novel composed of journals and letters, telling of the vampire Count Dracula and involving hypnotism and other occult interests. The novel was a bestseller upon first publication, soon went into paperback and is still selling steadily. Many film versions have been made, two of the most memorable being Universal's early talkie of 1931 starring Bela Lugosi and the Hammer Films Dracula (1958), which established Christopher Lee as the cinema's new king of vampires. Besides the numerous Hammer remakes and sequels, other versions have included Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic homage to Murnau, Nosferatu (1979) with Klaus Kinski, while Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) offered a visually stylish interpretation in many ways faithful to the novel, though Gary Oldman's Count had now become a romantic hero. Maurice Hindle was born at Great Barr, in the old county of Warwickshire, England. He studied at the universities of Keele, Durham and Essex, gaining a Ph.D. in Literature from Essex in 1989. He currently works as Arts Faculty Manager for the Open University in London and also teaches literature for the OU. As well as producing editions of Frankenstein, Caleb Williams and Dracula for Penguin Classics, he has edited Godwin's last two novels Cloudesley (1830) and Deloraine (1833) for Pickering and Chatto's Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (1992). He is currently working on the life and writings of the early nineteenth-century chemist and poet Humphry Davy, and a book, Studying Shakespeare on Film. Christopher Frayling is Rector of London's Royal College of Art and Professor of Cultural History there. He is well known as a historian, a critic and an award-winning broadcaster on radio and television. He has published many books and articles on aspects of cultural history, including Spaghetti Westerns (1980), The Face of Tutankhamun (1982), Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1991), Nightmare: The Birth of Horror (1996) and Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death (2000). He has contributed articles on film, popular culture and the visual arts to many newspapers and magazines, including the New Statesman, Modern Painters, Sight & Sound, Time Out and the Burlington Magazine. He is chairman of the Design Council and the longest serving Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Christopher Frayling was knighted for services to art and design education in 2001. He edited Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles for Penguin Classics.