The New Annotated Dracula
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Published by: W. W. Norton & Company
Release Date: October 17, 2008
Pages: 672
ISBN13: 978-0393064506
OVERVIEW
In his first work since his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger returns with this spectacular, lavishly illustrated homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. With a daring conceit, Klinger accepts Stoker’s contention that the Dracula tale is based on historical fact. Traveling through two hundred years of popular culture and myth as well as graveyards and the wilds of Transylvania, Klinger’s notes illuminate every aspect of this haunting narrative (including a detailed examination of the original typescript of Dracula, with its shockingly different ending, previously unavailable to scholars). Klinger investigates the many subtexts of the original narrative—from masochistic, necrophilic, homoerotic, “dentophilic,” and even heterosexual implications of the story to its political, economic, feminist, psychological, and historical threads. Employing the superb literary detective skills for which he has become famous, Klinger mines this 1897 classic for nuggets that will surprise even the most die-hard Dracula fans and introduce the vampire-prince to a new generation of readers.
PRAISE
“This is a book every serious reader of the horror genre should have on his or her shelf. You will read Dracula with new eyes. Fascinating!”
—Stephen King
“When the madman Renfield invokes Dracula, he pleads: ‘You will not pass me by, will You, dear Master, in your distribution of good things?’ The New Annotated Dracula is so full of good things—detailed historical annotations, iconic images of the vampire and his swooning victims, illuminating essays—that many readers will wonder if its author has not been personally rewarded for his services to the dark lord. Certainly nobody alive knows more about Dracula than Les Klinger!”
—Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Bound to Please and Classics for Pleasure
“For two years I have said that the one book I would take to that proverbial desert island is Leslie Klinger’s The New Annoated Sherlock Holmes. Having just read, studied and reread The New Annotated Dracula, I’d toss my last bottle of water to include this extraordinary volume on my raft.”
—Otto Penzler, editor of The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
BACKSTORY
The annotations cover a wide range of topics, from Victorian glossary to cultural history, enlightening the text. The notes also compare in detail the published text, the author’s working notes, the original manuscript of the novel, and the author’s abridgement. The introduction and extensive appendices examine the history of vampire fiction and other popular versions of Dracula, including film, stage, and comic book adaptations.