Dracula - Full Audiobook

Sexuality and seduction are two of the novel\'s most frequently discussed themes...!

eBook DESCRIPTION

Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. As an epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist, but opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, hunt Dracula and, in the end, kill him.

eBook TAGS

VAMPIRE NOVEL, COUNT DRACULA, TRANSYLVANIA, Vlad III, Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes, Horror Tale, Epistolary Fiction, Gothic Fiction,,,

eBook EXCERPT or SYNOPSIS

The original 541-page typescript of Dracula was believed to have been lost until it was found in a barn in northwestern Pennsylvania in the early 1980s. It consisted of typed sheets with many emendations, and handwritten on the title page was \"THE UN-DEAD.\" The author\'s name was shown at the bottom as Bram Stoker. One author remarked: \"the most famous horror novel ever published, its title changed at the last minute.\" The typescript was purchased by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. \nAs an epistolary novel, Dracula is narrated through a series of documents. The novel\'s first four chapters are related as the journals of Jonathan Harker. Scholar David Seed notes that Harker\'s accounts function as an attempt to translocate the \"strange\" events of his visit to Dracula\'s castle into the nineteenth-century tradition of travelogue writing. John Seward, Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker all keep a crystalline account of the period as an act of self-preservation; David Seed notes that Harker\'s narrative is written in shorthand to remain inscrutable to the Count, protecting his own identity, which Dracula threatens to destroy. Harker\'s journal, for example, embodies the only advantage during his stay at Dracula\'s castle: that he knows more than the Count thinks he does. The novel\'s disparate accounts approach a kind of narrative unity as the narrative unfolds. In the novel\'s first half, each narrator has a strongly characterised narrative voice, with Lucy\'s showing her verbosity, Seward\'s businesslike formality, and Harker\'s excessive politeness. These narrative styles also highlight the power struggle between vampire and his hunters; the increasing prominence of Van Helsing\'s broken English as Dracula gathers power represents the entrance of the foreigner into Victorian society.