Two centuries ago, Dr. John Polidori’s story “The Vampyre” was published, and vampire literature was born. The Vampyre’s Legacy series has charted the evolution of the genre over two hundred years, taking one story from each decade to use as a case study. But the most recent decade presents a problem: the period is still too…
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 10: Sympathy for the Devil
During the sixties and seventies, pop culture was hit by an explosion of interest in the occult. Aleister Crowley glowered from the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band while Mick Jagger sang “Sympathy for the Devil”, and before long Black Sabbath would be embracing Gothic imagery as part of the nascent metal scene….
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 7: Dion Fortune’s Demon Lover
Born Violet Mary Firth in 1890, the British writer Dion Fortune is one of the most influential figures in Western occultism. She penned a sizeable number of books – both fiction and non-fiction – prior to her death in 1946, including a sequence of occult novels. The first of these, a 1927 book entitled The…
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 6: An Occult Dawn
In 1897, Dracula had successfully transported the vampire from a hazy Gothic past to turn-of-the-century London – and it is quite possible that the Count would have found himself at home. After all, he arrived just in time to see a rising interest in occultism that occurred during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 5: Enter Count Dracula
The 1890s were a bountiful decade for vampire literature. This was the period that saw the publication of James Maclaren Cobban’s Master of his Fate (1890), E. E. Baldwin’s The Strange Story of Dr. Senex (1891), Cora Lin Daniels’ Sardia (1891), Julien Gordon’s Vampires (1891), Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), and Thaddeus…
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 4: Carmilla and Company
The previous installment of this series covered attempts to deconstruct vampire fiction during the mid-nineteenth century, with writers stepping back and seeing how vampirism could serve symbolic purposes. As the century headed towards its close, the time was right for the vampire to be reconstructed once again. With the more analytical works out of the…
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 3: Deconstructing the Vampire
We have seen how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, vampire fiction was pioneered by John Polidori and elaborated upon by later writers. These explorations continued into the century’s latter half as authors placed the vampire under the microscope, poking and prodding their specimens to work out exactly what the literary vampire represented….
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 2: The Feminine Touch
As the decades passed, more writers tried their hands at the vampire genre that had been established by Lord Byron and John Polidori. In the process, they came up with new concepts and new approaches. One area in which vampire literature diversified was in terms of gender. Polidori and Byron were men, as were their…