The Vampyre, based on a discarded idea of Byron’s, is the first portrayal of the alluring vampire figure familiar to readers of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. Ernestus Berchtold scandalously draws on the rumours of Byron’s affair with his half-sister for a Faustian updating of the myth of Oedipus, which it combines with an account of the struggle of Swiss patriots against the Napoleonic invasion.
Along with Polidori’s work, this edition also includes stories read and written by the travellers in the Genevan summer of 1816 and contemporary responses to The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold.
The late D.L. Macdonald was Professor of English at the University of Calgary.
Kathleen Scherf is Professor and Dean in the Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary. They are the co-editors of the Broadview editions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindications (1997), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1999), and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (2004).