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3 - Men and Monsters

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Summary

Throughout his career, Bram Stoker was an energetic writer of adventure romances; his early novella Buried Treasures, first serialized - like The Primrose Path - in The Shamrock (March 1875) has a pair of male friends exploring sunken ships for missing treasure; The Watter's Mou (1895) is a tale of smuggling and self-sacrifice in a remote Scottish fishing village; The Mystery of the Sea (1903) has the same location plus buried treasure, kidnapping and a cross-dressing heroine who is a descendent of Sir Francis Drake; and the last published novel The Lair of the White Worm (1911) is also an adventure novel in which the hero does battle with a deadly serpent-woman. Stoker's use of the forms of the adventure romance and the quest narrative, in which a young man journeys out into the world to accomplish some great feat or to overcome some unspeakable evil, also makes itself felt in many other works, including Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars.

In using the framework of the adventure story, Stoker was trying to exploit what had become an enormously popular (and potentially lucrative) sub-genre of fiction. Two bestsellers - Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1886) - had helped to set in motion a revival of this kind of writing in which, as Stevenson explained in ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), ‘the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean open-air adventure…’. Writers such as R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty and W. H. Kingston were recognized, alongside Haggard and Stevenson, as the main romance writers, and they came to be joined from time to time by others such as Marie Louise de la Ramee (who used the pen- name ‘Ouida’), Rudyard Kipling, Anthony Hope and John Buchan.

Summarizing the characteristics of the adventure romance or ‘imperial romance’ (as it is sometimes termed), Deirdre David notes the form's emphasis on ‘English national and masculine subjectivity’, ‘tropes of travel and hazardous adventure’ and ‘racism [which]…is unembarrassed and extreme’ with race as a ‘glamorous or demonic marker’.

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Bram Stoker
, pp. 70 - 99
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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