Tickets are selling rapidly for the Polidori Vampyre Symposium so do book here before it’s too late! The programme is available here and we think it’s looking fabulous–see the images below.
‘Mad, bad, and dangerous’—and hot! That’s how Lady Caroline Lamb saw the poet Byron, the lover who discarded her. And that’s the image we have of the vampire in the twenty-first century. Lamb cast Byron as the dark and duplicitous Gothic seducer, Lord Ruthven in her novel Glenarvon (1816). In turn, John Polidori, Byron’s physician, took the name Lord Ruthven in creating the first literary vampire, 200 years ago in his novella The Vampyre. Polidori’s vampire is a satirical portrait of Byron as a seducer of women in polite society. Ruthven spawned a series of demonic lovers from the Brontës and Daphne du Maurier to the more sexy incarnations of Dracula and the paranormal romances of mortal women seduced by brooding bad and dangerous vampires. At this symposium, leading scholars of the Gothic tell this story of the legacy of Polidori’s disquieting vampire.
