A rich selection of background and source materials is provided in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and "Dracula's Guest," the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. "Dramatic and Film Variations" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.

Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijsktra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.

I tell you your mine will be in ruins and your home destroyed and your children forgotten ...but this hill will be standing still to confound you.' So curses Morty Donovan when 'Copper John' Brodrick builds his mine at Hungry Hill. The Brodricks of Clonmere gain great wealth by harnessing the power of Hungry Hill and extracting the treasure it holds. The Donovans, the original owners of Clonmere Castle, resent the Brodricks' success, and consider the great house and its surrounding land theirs by rights. For generations the feud between the families has simmered, always threatening to break into violence ...

Nina Auerbach brilliantly reveals the Ellen Terry whose roles, on stage and off, embodied everything that a rapidly changing world exhorted women to be.

Auerbach examines the writer of depth and recklessness now largely known only as the author of Rebecca, looking at the way her sharp-edged fiction, with its brutal and often perverse family relationships, has been softened in film adaptations of her work. She reads both du Maurier's life in her writings, and the sensibility of a vanished class and time that haunts the fringes of our own age.

"Narrative and Culture" draws together fourteen essays in which leading scholars discuss narrative texts and practices in a variety of media and genres, subjecting them to sustained cultural analysis. The essays cross national borders and historical periods as often and as easily as they traverse disciplinary boundaries, and they examine canonical fiction as well as postmodern media--photography, film, television. The primary subject of these pieces, notes Janice Carlisle, is "the relation between the telling of tales and the engagement of their tellers and listeners in the practices of specific societies."
Contributors: Nina Auerbach, Thomas B. Byers, Jay Clayton, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Mary Lou Emery, Colleen Kennedy, Vera Mark, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Paul Morrison, Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey, John Carlos Rowe, Daniel R. Schwarz, Carol Siegel, Felipe Smith

As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive of the society that fostered it. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie's adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti's unsettling antifantasies in "Speaking Likenesses," these are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary stories, full of strange delights for readers of any age.
""Forbidden Journeys" is not only a darkly entertaining book to read for the fantasies and anti-fantasies told, but also is a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies."--"United Press International"
"A service to feminists, to Victorian Studies, to children's literature and to children."--Beverly Lyon Clark, "Women's Review of Books"
"These are stories to laugh over, cheer at, celebrate, and wince at. . . . "Forbidden Journeys" is a welcome reminder that rebellion was still possible, and the editors' intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy."--Allyson F. McGill, "Belles Lettres
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Nina Auerbach shows how every age embraces the vampire it needs, and gets the vampire it deserves. Working with a wide range of texts, as well as movies and television, Auerbach locates vampires at the heart of our national experience and uses them as a lens for viewing the last two hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history. [Auerbach] has seen more Hammer movies than I (or the monsters) have had steaming hot diners, encountered more bloodsuckers than you could shake a stick at, even a pair of crossed sticks, such as might deter a very sophisticated ogre, a hick from the Moldavian boonies....Auerbach has dissected and deconstructed them with the tender ruthlessness of a hungry chef, with cogency and wit.--Eric Korn, Times Literary Supplement This seductive work offers profound insights into many of the urgent concerns of our time and forces us to confront the serious meanings that we invest, and seek, in even the shadiest manifestations of the eroticism of death.--Wendy Doniger, The Nation A vigorous, witty look at the undead as cultural icons.--Kirkus Review In case anyone should think this book is merely a boring lit-crit exposition...Auerbach sets matters straight in her very first paragraph. 'What vampires are in any given generation, ' she writes, 'is a part of what I am and what my times have become. This book is a history of Anglo-American culture through its mutating vampires.'...Her book really takes off.--Maureen Duffy, New York Times Book Review

Here is a bold new vision of Victorian culture: a study of myths of womanhood that shatters the usual generalizations about the squeezed, crushed, and ego-less Victorian woman.

Through copious examples drawn from literature, art, and biography, Auerbach reconstructs three central paradigms: the angel/demon, the old maid, and the fallen woman. She shows how these animate a pervasive Victorian vision of a mobile female outcast with divine and demonic powers. Fear of such disruptive, self-creating figures, Auerbach argues, produces the approved ideal of the dutiful, family-bound woman. The awe they inspire associates them with characters in literature, the only vehicles of immortality in whom most Victorians could unreservedly believe.

Auerbach looks at a wonderful variety of sources: Svengali, Dracula, and Freud; poets and major and minor novelists Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Ruskin; lives of women, great and unknown; Anglican sisterhoods and Magdalen homes; bardolatry and the theater; Pre- Raphaelite paintings and contemporary cartoons and book illustrations. Reinterpreting a medley of fantasies, she demonstrates that female powers inspired a vivid myth central to the spirit of the age.

In this work, literary critic and vampire enthusiast, Nina Auerbach, argues that every age embraces the vampire it needs and, at the same time, gets the vampire it deserves. Working with a range of texts, including movies and television, Auerbach locates vampires at the heart of national experience - and reads the last 200 years of Anglo-American cultural history through them. She suggests that all vampires are not alike: their variability in appearance, chosen prey, degree of menace and even the rules governing their undead existence are all symptoms of social and cultural change. The book opens in 19th-century England and then moves to 20th-century America. Auerbach shows how the vampire's story is retoldd in these works to fit needs ranging from the obsessions of individual authors to those of entire political cultures. Beginning with Byron and Polidori, Rymer and Le Fanu, she shows how their vampires offer an intimacy, often homoerotic, that threatens the structures of class and the authority of husbands and fathers. The publication of Bram Stoker's "Dracula", in 1897, ends this tradition, introducing a tyrannical vampire for late Victorian readers who were haunted less by ideas of the undead than by a monster of their own clinical making, the homosexual. Moving from the beginning of the 20th century through the early 1990s, Auerbach examines a range of popular fiction and film (including five film adaptations of "Dracula" between 1931 and 1992) in relation to changing ideologies of power. She maps an American odyssey from revolution to nostalgia to reaction. From the 1970s, when novelists like Anne Rice proved vampires were no longer exclusively male creations, Auerbach moves to the Reagon years, when vampires were affected by the twin forces of conservative reaction and the AIDS epidemic. She concludes on a note of hope by finding vampires reborn in a female tradition in works ranging from Queer theory and performance to fiction and film.