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The Vampyre
The Vampyre is a short novel written by John William Polidori and generally regarded as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction.
The Vampyre was first published on 1 April 1819 by Colburn in parts in the New Monthly Magazine with the false attribution "A Tale by Lord Byron". The name of the work's protagonist, "Lord Ruthven", added to this assumption, for that name was originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon , in which a thinly-disguised Byron figure was also named Lord Ruthven. Despite repeated denials by Byron and Polidori, the authorship often went unclarified.
The novel was an immediate popular success, partly because of the Byron attribution and partly because it exploited the gothic horror predilections of the public. Polidori transformed the vampire from a character in folklore into the form we recognize today - an aristocratic fiend who preys among high society.
The story has its genesis in the summer of 1816, the Year Without a Summer, when Europe and parts of North America suffered under a severe climate abnormality. Polidori and Byron were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer", over three days in June the five turned to telling fantastical stories, and then writing their own. Fuelled by ghost stories such as the Fantasmagoriana, William Beckford's Vathek and quantities of laudanum, Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's and in "two or three idle mornings" produced The Vampyre.
Polidori's work had an immense impact on contemporary sensibilities and ran through numerous editions and translations. An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard ’s novel, Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires, falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who himself then wrote his own version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. Edgar Allan Poe, Gogol, Alexandre Dumas and Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre.
Further reading
- Christopher Frayling - Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula 1992. ISBN 0571167926
External links
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