![]() Most famously, this was the genesis of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus. On this night, a group of Romantic writers gathered at the Villa Diodati in Geneva – Percy Shelley, his wife-to-be Mary, Lord Byron and John Polidori – decided to each write a ghost story. The sundry vampire protagonists and antagonists who followed, from Carmilla Karnstein and Count Dracula to Lestat de Lioncourt and Edward Cullen, can trace their lineage to this work of early nineteenth-century literature.įor the full story behind Polidori’s tale, we must head back still further to one of the most significant dates in the history of horror: the sixteenth of June 1816. That year, the figure of the vampire – which had been previously glimpsed in macabre poetry and writings on folklore – became a viable subject for prose fiction. John Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre”. It was in 1819 that readers of supernatural fiction were first gripped by Dr. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |