'The Vampyre' and Other Writings
John William Polidori author Franklin Bishop editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:25th Aug '05
Should be back in stock very soon
John Polidori (1795-1821) is a fascinating but always shadowy figure of Romanticism, an impetuous, sensitive writer of fierce talent. His encounter with Byron, Shelley and their circle has contributed both to his fame and notoriety on the one hand, and to his neglect on the other: he is too often known only at second-hand through the recollections of his famous friends.
That encounter with Byron, Shelley et al was the inspiration for his most celebrated work, the influential and still compelling tale of The Vampyre (1819). With this story, Polidori created a figure of seductive evil who continues to exert a powerful hold over literature and popular culture. The Vampyre alone would confirm Polidori's importance within the Gothic tradition. This collection also makes available many of the Polidori's lesser-known works, showing him to be a resourceful, sensitive writer whose literary career was cut short by his early death. Polidori's medical thesis on the subject of nightmares, his essay 'Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure' and his Gothic novel The Modern Oedipus (both included in full), his poetry, diaries and letters, illuminate the context in which The Vampyre was written and deepen our understanding of Romanticism and the Gothic. Many of these works have rarely, if ever, been republished since the nineteenth century.
Max Fincher, Times Literary Supplement, 17th February 2006
John William Polidori (1795-1821) is best remembered for 'The Vampyre' (1819), a short story written when Polidori joined Byron, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont in writing ghost-stories in the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 - a competition which also produced Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818).The inspiration for 'The Vampyre' came from Byron's contributory fragment to the competition, 'Augustus Darvell'.But as Franklin Charles Bishop emphasizes, 'The Vampyre' is Polidori's own nightmarish creation.Bishop argues that Polidori transformed a crude, exotic image of the vampire in eighteenth-century folklore into a civilised aristocrat whose predatory blood-lust is invisible; his tale prepared the way for Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and countless film resurrections.
This edition also contains extracts from Polidori's journal for 1810, which Byron's publisher had commissioned from him, as well as a selection of letters from 1816-17, chosen because readers will be interested in the Byron connection.Four letters about Polidori, newly translated, are also included.Polidori is 'spirited', 'knowledgeable' and an 'honest, naive, and well-meaning young man' according to Louis de Brême, a patrician in Geneva.Another letter refers to Polidori's arrest by the Austrian police at the Milan opera after a fight with a grenadier.Extracts from his doctoral dissertation on sleepwalking add to our knowledge of the interest in the power of the imagination and memory in the period.His dissertation is complemented by selections from a philosophical essay on the pleasure of the imagination, Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure, (1818) written by Polidori while dangerously ill after a riding accident.
Familiarizing the reader with a range of Polidori's other writings is achieved at the expense of comprehensiveness.The inclusion of Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (1819) Polidori's only novel, means less space for his only surviving play, Ximenes; or, The Modern Abraham, or his contribution toSketches Illustrative of the Manners and Customs of France, Switzerland and Italy (1821).The Sketches illuminate post-Napoleonic Europe and Polidori's talent for describing and evoking the character and landscape of the French, Italians and the Genovese, if not always generously.
ISBN: 9781857547870
Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 20mm
Weight: 340g
192 pages