Gina Wisker, Dr Sam George, Dr Bill Hughes, Dr Ivan Phillips, writer Marcus Sedgwick, and OGOM ECRs and doctoral students Dr Kaja Franck, Daisy Butcher, and Dr Jillian Wingfield. William Hughes, Dr Stacey Abbott, Dr Sue Chaplin, Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Prof. The speakers are: Sir Christopher Frayling, Prof. The delegates have been selected for their expertise in the Byronic, the Gothic, and the vampiric. Guest speakers have been invited to share their research into the many variations on monstrosity and deadly allure spawned by Polidori’s seminal textual reincarnation of Byronic glamour. Manchester University Press, 2013) and the first special by Sam George and Bill Hughes (Manchester: Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment Successful conference on vampires in 2010 followed by an edited collection, Return to the beginnings of the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, which began with This symposium will trace Polidori’s bloodsucking progenyĪnd his heritage of ‘curious disquiet’ in literature and other media. Lestat and Louis in Interview with the Vampire (dir. Thus, the familiar vampires Count Dracula (1897), Anne Rice’s Lestat (1976), and the infamously sparkly Edward Cullen of Twilight (2005) can all claim to have been his heir. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, modelled on Lord Byron via Lady Caroline Lamb’s scandalous Glenarvon (1818), is aristocratic and sexualised and, though something of a blank canvas, even potentially sympathetic, providing a template for the ‘Byronic hero’ that features in Gothic romance down to the paranormal romances of the present day. But Polidori gave the creature the form that largely persists through subsequent vampire narratives, transforming it from the animalistic monster of the Slavic peasantry to something that can haunt the drawing rooms of Western society, undetected. This could be qualified if short political satires and ethnographical enquiries featuring the monster constitute genres, then these had already emerged out of folkloric accounts during the eighteenth century. Sir Christopher Frayling declares The Vampyre to be ‘the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre’.
The Vampyre was something of a sensation (partially owing to its misattribution to Byron) and spawned stage versions and imitations that were hugely popular. Polidori took this fragment and turned it into the tale of the vampire Lord Ruthven, preying on the vulnerable women of society. Byron’s contribution to the contest was an inconclusive fragment about a mysterious man characterised by ‘a curious disquiet’.
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