A dream of Dracula : in search of the living dead /
A Dream of Dracula: a dark inquiry into the role of the vampire in civilization; into the passion of humans to escape the final doom of death; into our hunger for, our dream of, immortality this side of the grave. From ancient Egypt to contemporary America, Leonard Wolf's book explores the vamp...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Boston :
Little, Brown and Company,
[1972]
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | A Dream of Dracula: a dark inquiry into the role of the vampire in civilization; into the passion of humans to escape the final doom of death; into our hunger for, our dream of, immortality this side of the grave. From ancient Egypt to contemporary America, Leonard Wolf's book explores the vampire in literature, in history, in our culture and society; the vampire in theater and movies -- and the vampire in real life. At the center of the book stands Dracula – a nineteenth-century literary invention, yet possessed with an archetypal radiance that draws our fears and fascination to him like moths to a flame. Dracula is our main symbol of the vampire, but there is far more. There is the handsome, wealthy Baron Marshal of France, Gilles de Rais, who in the time of Joan of Arc confessed to the murder of two hundred young boys and girls. There is the living dead in literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Baudelaire and Thomas Mann, from Dorian Gray to H. Rider Haggard's She to Sir Richard Burton's description of Kali, the black goddess-vampire. And there is the vampire in its modern incarnation. In one terrifying chapter, we meet a man -- an American -- who has become so fascinated with the legend of Dracula that he has begun to feed upon blood himself. Yet if he is atypical, it is only because his passion has become more of an obsession than most people's. For one thing Leonard Wolf makes clear, as he leads us through his intellectual exploration of dark and light, his strange and beautiful book, at once horrifying and lyrical: there is a bit of the vampire in all of us. A Dream of Dracula: what is the difference between dark and light? The subject of vampirism has engrossed Leonard Wolf for years, which is not surprising, considering that the actual place of his birth is Transylvania, the home of the dread Count Dracula. A map of Transylvania illustrates A Dream of Dracula, as well as twenty-one illustrations associated with persons and events in the book. Wolf is now a professor of English literature at California State University, San Francisco, and the author of Voices from the Love Generation and The Passion of Israel. |
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| Physical Description: | xiii, 327 pages : illustrations, 25 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [319]-326). |
| ISBN: | 9780316951180 0316951188 |