The Vampyre
- 30bladzijden
- 2 uur lezen
John W. Polidori Boeken
John William Polidori, een arts en schrijver verbonden aan de Romantische beweging, wordt beschouwd als de schepper van het vampiergenre. Zijn verhaal, "The Vampyre", introduceerde voor het eerst de aristocratische vampier die zich in de hogere kringen ophoudt in de Engelse literatuur. In plaats van te putten uit folklore, baseerde Polidori zijn personage op Lord Byron, waarmee hij het archetype van de moderne vampier vestigde. Dit baanbrekende werk, zonder zijn toestemming gepubliceerd, legde de basis voor talloze latere verhalen in zowel de literatuur als de film.
The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre
- 278bladzijden
- 10 uur lezen
`The Vampyre' was first published in 1819 in the London New Monthly Magazine. The present volume - a companion to Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine in World's Classics - selects thirteen other tales of the macabre first published in the leading London and Dublin magazines between 1819 and 1838. It includes Edward Bulwer's chilling account of the doppelganger, Letitia Landon's elegant reworking of the Gothic romance, William Carleton's terrifying description of an actual lynching, and James Hogg's ghoulish exploitation of the cholera epidemic of 1831-2.
The original story of Sweeney Todd, 'The Demon Barber of Fleet Street'.
In 1816, John William Polidori travelled to Geneva as Lord Byron’s personal physician. There they met Mary Godwin (later Shelley) and her lover Percy Shelley and decided to while away a wet summer by writing ghost stories. The only two to complete their stories were Mary Shelley, who published Frankenstein in 1818, and Polidori, whose The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold were both published in 1819. The Vampyre, based on a discarded idea of Byron’s, is the first portrayal of the alluring vampire figure familiar to readers of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. Ernestus Berchtold scandalously draws on the rumours of Byron’s affair with his half-sister for a Faustian updating of the myth of Oedipus, which it combines with an account of the struggle of Swiss patriots against the Napoleonic invasion. Along with Polidori’s work, this edition also includes stories read and written by the travellers in the Genevan summer of 1816 and contemporary responses to The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold.
