Dracula's crypt
Subtitle: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the question of blood
By: Joseph Valente.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 173
Subjects: Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912.; Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912 -- Knowledge -- Ireland.; National characteristics, Irish, in literature.; Horror tales, English -- History and criticism.; Dracula, Count (Fictitious character); Vampires in literature.; Blood in literature.; Ireland -- In literature.
Description: "Dracula's Crypt unearths the Irish roots of Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece, offering a fresh interpretation of the author's relationship to his novel and to the politics of blood that consumes its characters.".

"An ingenious reappraisal of a classic text, Dracula's Crypt presents Stoker's novel as a subtly ironic commentary on England's preoccupation with racial purity.

Probing psychobiographical, political, and cultural elements of Stoker's background and milieu, Joseph Valente distinguishes Stoker's viewpoint from that of his virulently racist, hypermasculine vampire hunters, showing how the author's dual Anglo-Celtic heritage and uncertain status as an Irish parvenu among London's theatrical elite led him to espouse a progressive racial ideology at odds with the dominant Anglo-Saxon supremacism.

In the light of Stoker's experience, the shabby-genteel Count Dracula can be seen as a doppelganger, an ambiguous figure who is at once the blood-conscious landed aristocrat and the bloodthirsty foreign invader."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [145]-163) and index.