Vampires have stalked humans for thousands of years, but it was just 200 years ago that a young English doctor named .

Although far less well-known than , Polidori카지노 게임 컬렉션�s was first published 카지노 게임 컬렉션� suggestively 카지노 게임 컬렉션� on April Fools카지노 게임 컬렉션� Day 1819. This brief tale of terror set the pattern for all future representations of the vampire, including Stoker카지노 게임 컬렉션�s, and it launched a vampire craze that after two centuries still retains its ability to grab us by the throat.

It is hard to imagine, but The Vampyre as well as Frankenstein, two of Western literature카지노 게임 컬렉션�s most enduring myths, were the results of the same ghost story writing contest.

Vampires today inhabit a wide realm of the popular imagination in everything from novels, films and television shows to cartoons, video games, comic books and advertisements. They are also a powerful metaphor for conceiving and representing all manner of cultural practices and social problems, from the spread of sexually transmitted disease, through the mental and bodily pains of drug addiction, to the many ways in which technology and social media penetrate our daily lives.

The writing contest

Handsome, arrogant, and hot-tempered, was educated at a Catholic boarding school and then at the 카지노게임사이트 of Edinburgh, where in 1815 he received his medical degree at the age of just 19. Less than a year later, the course of his life changed dramatically when , the most famous literary man of the day, hired him as his travelling companion and personal physician.

Quick to see the commercial potential of the arrangement, Byron카지노 게임 컬렉션�s publisher, John Murray, commissioned Polidori to keep a diary of his time with the notorious poet, whose passionate interest in young men and scandalous love affair with his half-sister Augusta had hastened his departure from England.

Polidori immediately saw the predatory side of Byron카지노 게임 컬렉션�s personality.

카지노 게임 컬렉션�As soon as he reached his room,카지노 게임 컬렉션� Polidori wrote from Belgium in April 1816, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�Lord Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

Shortly thereafter, Byron and Polidori took up residence at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. Polidori saw himself as a rival to Byron and relations between them soon deteriorated.

카지노 게임 컬렉션�What is there excepting writing poetry that I cannot do better than you?카지노 게임 컬렉션� Polidori demanded.

카지노 게임 컬렉션�First,카지노 게임 컬렉션� Byron snapped in reply, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door 카지노 게임 컬렉션� Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point 카지노 게임 컬렉션� and thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.카지노 게임 컬렉션�

The aristocrat and his doctor were soon joined by a like-minded trio of literary and sexual renegades: the radical poet and free-love advocate Percy Bysshe Shelley, his 18-year-old lover Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Mary카지노 게임 컬렉션�s stepsister Claire Clairmont, also 18 and Byron카지노 게임 컬렉션�s most recent amour. It was an extraordinary meeting of minds and bodies.

Bad weather kept the group indoors, and in mid-June . Claire defaulted. Shelley may have produced a brief verse fragment as his contribution to the competition. Byron started but did not complete the short tale of terror now known as Augustus Darvell.

The winners are카지노 게임 컬렉션�

Godwin (the future Mary Shelley) and Polidori each produced a finished and immensely influential work. She created Frankenstein. He composed The Vampyre.

These spectacular results make the competition the most famous in all of English literary history. It is a striking thought that the same writing contest gave us both Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the two most enduring myths of the modern world.

Before Polidori, vampires were very different creatures. Shaggy, fetid and bestial, they preyed on family members, neighbours or livestock in nocturnal raids that in many accounts approached both the risible and the revolting. Polidori changed all that.

His vampire was highly resourceful and haunted, not the village or the district, but the drawing rooms of polite society and the pleasure dens of international travellers. What is more, instead of the peasant-turned-ghoul of ancient folklore, Polidori elevated the vampire to the ranks of the aristocracy, where as a hypnotically handsome predator he seduced beautiful young women and sucked their life away.

Polidori카지노 게임 컬렉션�s tale centres on fatal vows, paralysis, isolation, betrayal and the return of the dead. . Aubrey is Ruthven카지노 게임 컬렉션�s friend and travelling partner, and his relationship with Ruthven is usually read as Polidori카지노 게임 컬렉션�s own complex fascination with Byron 카지노 게임 컬렉션� a fascination that both attracts and appalls him.

In the tale, Ruthven sucks strength from Aubrey as their relationship declines, but he takes a much more deadly interest in Aubrey카지노 게임 컬렉션�s unnamed sister and Aubrey카지노 게임 컬렉션�s close friend, Ianthe, both of whom he dispatches with his insatiable fangs:

카지노 게임 컬렉션�Upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: 카지노 게임 컬렉션� to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, 카지노 게임 컬렉션�a Vampyre, a Vampyre!카지노 게임 컬렉션�카지노 게임 컬렉션�

A 200-year-long fascination

There have been many more sophisticated and explicit renderings of vampiric lore in the two centuries since Polidori카지노 게임 컬렉션�s tale first appeared. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu popularized the female vampire in his tale of terror Carmilla (1872), Stoker took the lordly fiend to new heights in Dracula (1897) and over the course of the last 100 years novelists, poets, playwrights, artists, movie makers and screenwriters have returned obsessively to vampires.

Polidori카지노 게임 컬렉션�s tale touched off this fascination. Two centuries ago he corrected the drastic deficiencies of the folklore and reimagined the vampire as a suave, mysterious, sexually dynamic elite who defies time and place, who consumes ravenously and without guilt, and who represents perverse passions that will not die.

But the spread of vampirism does not end there. Vampires terrify us now because, in the hands of the countless writers and artists who have drawn their creative lifeblood from Polidori카지노 게임 컬렉션�s reincarnation, they serve as potent and protean representations of whatever we most fear about foreignness, sexuality, selfhood, disease, the afterlife, history and much else. They represent our undying urge for gratification. They embody the monstrous return of what we bury both in ourselves and in our collective past.

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 is a professor of English Language and Literature at Queen's 카지노게임사이트. 

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