Download The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde PDF

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

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Publisher : Random House
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ISBN 10 : 9781446456828
Pages : 752 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (568 downloads)

Download The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde PDF Full Free by Neil McKenna and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘I have put my genius into my life but only my talent into my work’. So said Oscar Wilde of his remarkable life – a life more complex, more erotic, more troubled and more triumphant than any of his contemporaries ever knew or suspected. Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde charts fully for the first time Oscar’s astonishing erotic odyssey through Victorian London’s sexual underworld. Oscar Wilde emerges as a man driven personally and creatively by his powerful desires for sex with men, and Neil McKenna argues compellingly and convincingly that Oscar’s Wilde’s life and work can only be fully understood and appreciated in terms of his sexuality. The book draws of a vast range of sources, many of them previously unpublished, and includes startling new material like the statements made to the police by the male prostitutes and blackmailers ranged against Oscar Wilde at his trial which have been lost for over a century. Dazzlingly written, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde meticulously and brilliantly reconstructs Oscar Wilde’s emotional and sexual life, painting an astonishingly frank and vivid portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.


Download The Secret Life of the Savoy PDF

The Secret Life of the Savoy

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
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ISBN 10 : 9781643137391
Pages : 336 pages
Rating : 4.7/5 (373 downloads)

Download The Secret Life of the Savoy PDF Full Free by Olivia Williams and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The captivating story of the famed Savoy Hotel’s founders, told through three generations—and one hundred years—of glamour and high society. For the gondoliers-themed birthday dinner, the hotel obligingly flooded the courtyard to conjure the Grand Canal of Venice. Dinner was served on a silk-lined floating gondola, real swans were swimming in the water, and as a final flourish, a baby elephant borrowed from London Zoo pulled a five-foot high birthday cake. In three generations, the D'Oyly Carte family and London's Savoy Hotel pioneered the idea of the luxury hotel and the modern theater, propelled Gilbert and Sullivan to lasting stardom, made Oscar Wilde a transatlantic celebrity, inspired a P. G. Wodehouse series, and popularized early jazz, electric lights, and Art Deco. Following the history of the iconic Savoy Hotel through three generations of the D'Oyly Carte family, The Secret Life of the Savoy brings to life the extraordinary cultural legacy of the most famous hotel in the world.


Download Oscar Wilde's Scandalous Summer PDF

Oscar Wilde's Scandalous Summer

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Publisher : Amberley Publishing Limited
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ISBN 10 : 9781445636467
Pages : 224 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (364 downloads)

Download Oscar Wilde's Scandalous Summer PDF Full Free by Antony Edmonds and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2014-07-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1894 Oscar Wilde spent eight weeks in Worthing, and it was during this family holiday that he wrote his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. The Worthing holiday was a microcosm of Wilde's turbulent life during the three years between his falling in love with Lord Alfred Douglas in 1892 and his imprisonment in 1895. Constance Wilde, lonely and depressed, became emotionally involved with her husband s publisher, to whom she wrote a love letter on the day he visited the Wildes in Worthing. Meanwhile Wilde was spending much of his time with the feckless and demanding Douglas, and with three teenage boys he took out sailing, swimming and fishing. One of these boys was Alphonse Conway, with whom Wilde had a sexual relationship, and about whom he was to be questioned at length and to damaging effect in court six months later when he sued Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, for libel. This book tells for the first time the full story of the Worthing summer, set in the context of the three years of Wilde's life before his downfall. In the final chapter the author reassesses the trials, offering fresh insights into Wilde s attitude to the boys and young men with whom he had sexual relations. There are fifty-six illustrations, over thirty of which are photographs of Worthing as it was in Wilde s time, and three contemporary maps of the town.


Download Christianity's Dangerous Idea PDF

Christianity's Dangerous Idea

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Publisher : AuthorHouse
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ISBN 10 : 9781452006123
Pages : 706 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (61 downloads)

Download Christianity's Dangerous Idea PDF Full Free by Jonas E. Alexis and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2010 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today many in Hollywood and the media have declared open warfare on the family, education, and Christianity in general. Intellectuals have labeled religion, particularly Christianity, as mere wish fulfillment or a virus of the mind, something to be eradicated at all costs. In Christianity's Dangerous Idea, Jonas Alexis picks up where he left off in his previous books and continues to examine the ideological fallacies that have been fabricated in order to attack Christianity and the people who promote those fallacies. This latest book is a tour de force of rigorous logic and testable evidence for the Christian worldview from history, science, experience, common sense, and final destiny. More importantly, Alexis subjects the rivals of Christianity to the same rigorous testing. Christianity's Dangerous Idea clearly demonstrates the destructive nature of popular atheistic and anti-Christian philosophies, spread throughout Western culture by such famous people as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, Alan Moore, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Bruce Lee, Ayn Rand, Bart D. Ehrman, Richard Dawkins, and many more. In a scholarly yet readable fashion, Alexis shows that what the ancient Greeks often referred to as "the cult of Dionysus" has become mainstream in our modern age.


Download Oscar Wilde on Trial PDF

Oscar Wilde on Trial

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Publisher : Yale University Press
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ISBN 10 : 9780300222722
Pages : 670 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (227 downloads)

Download Oscar Wilde on Trial PDF Full Free by Joseph Bristow and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most authoritative account of a pivotal event in legal and cultural history: the trials of Oscar Wilde on charges of "gross indecency" Among the most infamous prosecutions of a literary figure in history, the two trials of Oscar Wilde for committing acts of "gross indecency" occurred at the height of his fame. After being found guilty, Wilde spent two years in prison, emerged bankrupt, and died in a cheap hotel room in Paris a few years after his release. The trials prompted a new intolerance toward homosexuality: habits of male bonding that were previously seen as innocent were now viewed as a threat, and an association grew in the public mind between gay men and the arts. Oscar Wilde on Trial assembles accounts from a variety of sources, including official and private letters, newspaper accounts, and previously published (but very incomplete) transcripts, to provide the most accurate and authoritative account to date of events that were pivotal in both legal and cultural history.


Download Oscar Wilde PDF

Oscar Wilde

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Publisher : Knopf
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ISBN 10 : 9780525656371
Pages : 864 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (563 downloads)

Download Oscar Wilde PDF Full Free by Matthew Sturgis and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fullest, most textural, most accurate—most human—account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life—based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life. "Simply the best modern biography of Wilde." —Evening Standard Drawing on material that has come to light in the past thirty years, including newly discovered letters, documents, first draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial, Matthew Sturgis meticulously portrays the key events and influences that shaped Oscar Wilde's life, returning the man "to his times, and to the facts," giving us Wilde's own experience as he experienced it. Here, fully and richly portrayed, is Wilde's Irish childhood; a dreamy, aloof boy; a stellar classicist at boarding school; a born entertainer with a talent for comedy and a need for an audience; his years at Oxford, a brilliant undergraduate punctuated by his reckless disregard for authority . . . his arrival in London, in 1878, "already noticeable everywhere" . . . his ten-year marriage to Constance Lloyd, the father of two boys; Constance unwittingly welcoming young men into the household who became Oscar's lovers, and dying in exile at the age of thirty-nine . . . Wilde's development as a playwright. . . becoming the high priest of the aesthetic movement; his successes . . . his celebrity. . . and in later years, his irresistible pull toward another—double—life, in flagrant defiance and disregard of England's strict sodomy laws ("the blackmailer's charter"); the tragic story of his fall that sent him to prison for two years at hard labor, destroying his life and shattering his soul.


Download Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture PDF

Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
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ISBN 10 : 9780821443033
Pages : 448 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (43 downloads)

Download Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture PDF Full Free by Joseph Bristow and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-12 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time. In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of “gross indecency” it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. As this volume shows, Wilde died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome and Robert Ross’s edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde’s name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings. This volume reveals why, more than a hundred years after his demise, Wilde’s value in the academic world, the auction house, and the entertainment industry stands higher than that of any modern writer.


Download Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre PDF

Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
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ISBN 10 : 9781611479485
Pages : 606 pages
Rating : 4.9/5 (794 downloads)

Download Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre PDF Full Free by Kevin Lane Dearinger and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clyde Fitch was a major figure in the American theatre, influential in his time and to the playwrights who followed. A collection of Fitch’s letters published in 1924 provided a sanitized record of his life, but no major biography has since appeared. Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre: An Olive in the Cocktail is the missing piece in the study of this important playwright and his contributions to gay history in a way that gives his plays the reconsideration and revival deserved.


Download The Faiths of Oscar Wilde PDF

The Faiths of Oscar Wilde

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Publisher : Springer
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ISBN 10 : 9780230503557
Pages : 228 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (35 downloads)

Download The Faiths of Oscar Wilde PDF Full Free by J. Killeen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-10-20 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original and energetic examination of the relationship between theology, faith, religious history and national politics in the works of Oscar Wilde, which focuses in particular on his life-long attraction to Catholicism. Wilde's Protestant heritage is also scrutinised, and its continued influence on him, as well as his antagonism towards it, is related to the narrative modes he chose and the philosophical positions he adopted.


Download The Picture of Dorian Gray PDF

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
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ISBN 10 : 9780674057920
Pages : 304 pages
Rating : 4.7/5 (579 downloads)

Download The Picture of Dorian Gray PDF Full Free by Oscar Wilde and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publishes for the first time the author's original, uncensored typescript, in an annotated edition with 60 color illustrations.


Download Resist Everything Except Temptation PDF

Resist Everything Except Temptation

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Publisher : AK Press
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ISBN 10 : 9781849353212
Pages : 245 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (532 downloads)

Download Resist Everything Except Temptation PDF Full Free by Kristian Williams and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar Wilde is remembered as a wit and a dandy, as a gay martyr, and as a brilliant writer, but his philosophical depth and political radicalism are often forgotten. Resist Everything Except Temptation locates Wilde in the tradition of left-wing anarchism, and argues that only when we take his politics seriously can we begin to understand the man, his life, and his work. Drawing from literary, historical, and biographical evidence, including archival research, the book outlines the philosophical influences and political implications of Wilde's ideas on art, sex, morality, violence, and above all, individualism. Williams raises questions about the relationships between culture and politics, between utopian aspirations and practical programs, and between individualism, group identity, and class struggle. The resulting volume represents, not merely a historical curiosity, but a contribution to current debates within political theory and a salvo in the broader culture wars.


Download At the Margins of Victorian Britain PDF

At the Margins of Victorian Britain

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
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ISBN 10 : 9780857734020
Pages : 232 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (34 downloads)

Download At the Margins of Victorian Britain PDF Full Free by Dennis Grube and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Britain, at the head of the vast British Empire, was the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. Yet, not all Britons were seen as possessing the characteristics that defined what it actually meant to be 'British.' At the Margins of Victorian Britain focuses on the political means of policing unwanted 'others' in Victorian society: the Irish, Catholics and Jews, atheists, prostitutes and homosexuals. In this groundbreaking study, Dennis Grube details the laws and conventions that were legally and culturally enforced in order to bar these 'others' from gaining power and influence in Victorian Britain. Utilizing a wide-ranging analysis, the book focuses on key case-studies: the anti-Semitism implicit in Lord Rothschild's barring from the House of Commons; the fine line between accepted male love and companionship and homosexuality, culminating in the Oscar Wilde trials of the 1890s; and how laws against disease were used to police prostitutes and correct moral vices. Political and legal rhetoric, backed by the force of legislation, set the boundaries of 'Britishness', and enforced those boundaries through the 'majesty' of British law. As Jews, Roman Catholics and atheists were brought into a genuine sense of partnership in the British constitution by being allowed to seek election to Parliament - homosexuals, prostitutes and the allegedly innately criminal Irish found themselves further and more vehemently displaced as the nineteenth century progressed. 'Otherness' stopped being a religious question and became instead a moral one. That fundamental shift marks the moment that 'Britishness' became a values-based question. And we've been arguing about what those values are ever since. This will be essential reading for those working in the fields of Victorian studies, social and cultural history and constitutional identity.


Download The World in Play PDF

The World in Play

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Publisher : Stanford University Press
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ISBN 10 : 9780804778947
Pages : 216 pages
Rating : 4.8/5 (789 downloads)

Download The World in Play PDF Full Free by Matthew Kaiser and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future. A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. The book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. Kaiser gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.


Download The Invention of Oscar Wilde PDF

The Invention of Oscar Wilde

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Publisher : Reaktion Books
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ISBN 10 : 9781789144222
Pages : 272 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (442 downloads)

Download The Invention of Oscar Wilde PDF Full Free by Nicholas Frankel and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One should either wear a work of art, or be a work of art,” Oscar Wilde once declared. In The Invention of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel explores Wilde’s self-creation as a “work of art” and a carefully constructed cultural icon. Frankel takes readers on a journey through Wilde’s inventive, provocative life, from his Irish origins—and their public erasure—through his challenges to traditional concepts of masculinity and male sexuality, his marriage and his affairs with young men, including his great love Lord Alfred Douglas, to his criminal conviction and final years of exile in France. Along the way, Frankel takes a deep look at Wilde’s writings, paradoxical wit, and intellectual convictions.


Download Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century PDF

Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

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Publisher : Routledge
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ISBN 10 : 9781317098652
Pages : 316 pages
Rating : 4.8/5 (986 downloads)

Download Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century PDF Full Free by Margaret Linley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Operating at the intersection where new technology meets literature, this collection discovers the relationship among image, sound, and touch in the long nineteenth century. The chapters speak to the special mixed-media properties of literature, while exploring the important interconnections of science, technology, and art at the historical moment when media was being theorized, debated, and scrutinized. Each chapter focuses on a specific visual, acoustic, or haptic dimension of media, while also calling attention to the relationships among the three. Famous works such as Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Shelley's Frankenstein are discussed alongside a range of lesser-known literary, scientific, and pornographic writings. Topics include the development of a print culture for the visually impaired; the relationship between photography and narrative; the kaleidoscope and modern urban experience; Christmas gift books; poetry, painting and music as remediated forms; the interface among the piano, telegraph, and typewriter; Ernst Heinrich Weber's model of rationalized tactility; and how the shift from visual to auditory telegraphic instruments amplified anxieties about the place of women in nineteenth-century information networks. Full of surprising insights and connections, the collection offers new impetus for stimulating historical conversations and debates about nineteenth-century media, while also contributing fresh perspectives on new media and (re)mediation today.


Download Wilde Discoveries PDF

Wilde Discoveries

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Publisher : University of Toronto Press
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ISBN 10 : 9781442665705
Pages : 408 pages
Rating : 4.5/5 (657 downloads)

Download Wilde Discoveries PDF Full Free by Joseph Bristow and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most significant resource for any researcher wishing to understand the finer details of Oscar Wilde’s remarkable career, the “Oscar Wilde and His Circle” archive at the University of California, Los Angeles houses the world’s largest collection of materials relating to the life and work of the gifted Irish writer. Wilde Discoveries brings together thirteen studies based on research done in this archive that span the course of Wilde’s work and shed light on previously neglected aspects of Wilde’s lively and varied professional and personal life. This volume offers fresh approaches to well-known works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray while paying serious attention to his lesser known writings and activities, including his earliest attempts at emulating the English Romantics, his editing of Woman’s World, and his fascination with anarchism. A detailed introduction by the volume editor ties the essays together and illustrates the distinctive evolution of research on this great writer’s extraordinary career.


Download Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula PDF

Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
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ISBN 10 : 9781631490118
Pages : 672 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (91 downloads)

Download Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula PDF Full Free by David J. Skal and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2017 Edgar Award Finalist A revelatory biography exhumes the haunted origins of the man behind the immortal myth, bringing us "the closest we can get to understanding [Bram Stoker] and his iconic tale" (The New Yorker). In this groundbreaking portrait of the man who birthed an undying cultural icon, David J. Skal "pulls back the curtain to reveal the author who dreamed up this vampire" (TIME magazine). Examining the myriad anxieties plaguing the Victorian fin de siecle, Skal stages Bram Stoker’s infirm childhood against a grisly tableau of medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad blood" that pervades Dracula. In later years, Stoker’s ambiguous sexuality is explored through his passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving, and his romantic rivalry with lifelong acquaintance Oscar Wilde—here portrayed as a stranger-than-fiction doppelgänger. Recalling the psychosexual contours of Stoker’s life and art in splendidly gothic detail, Something in the Blood is the definitive biography for years to come.