BYRONISM: INFLUENCES, CHARACTERISTICS AND
IMPORTANCE
1. Introduction (by Julia Fernández
Chiva)
2. Influences on Byron
(by Josué Álvarez Conejos & Paola Enguix
Fernández)
3. Byron’s characteristics and examples
(by Jessica Aguilar Vinyoles
& Cristina Camps Pérez)
4. Byronism (by Aina García Coll & Thais Martínez Alonso)
5. Byron’s Influence on other poets: Mary
Shelley and John William Polidori (by Mª José Jorquera Hervás)
Mary
Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus and Polidori was
inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic
vampire
genre.
Regarding the first one
of our two authors who were influenced by Lord Byron,
we stop at Mary Shelley and her novel Frankenstein or The
Modern Prometheus, which was first published in
But let’s see now how this amazing novel was produced by
Mary Shelley. It all began in 1816, or the ‘Year Without A Summer’
as it is commonly known because it was a snowy summer caused by the eruption of
Tambora in 1815. By that time, the 19-years-old Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin (our Mary Shelley), and Percy Bysshe Shelley
(who became her husband after), were visiting Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati settled in Lake Geneva
(Switzerland).
It was extremely cold and they just could not have the summer time they had
planned. They joined there and had a time reading Fantasmagoriana, an anthology
of German ghost stories. Then, after reading it, Byron had the idea of challenging
Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft an and Byron’s
personal physician John William Polidori
to compose a story, it was about a contest, and the winner would be that whose
story was the scariest one. Here is when Mary went on an idea based in a dream she
had had, where she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he had put together." This was the basis of Frankenstein.
Byron wrote just a fragment based on the vampire
legends he had heard when he traveled the Balkans,
and from this Polidori’ The Vampyre was created in 1819. Thus, the progenitor of
the romantic vampire literary genre
was born, and that is how the Frankenstein and vampire topics were conceived, just starting from that single circumstance.
The Modern Prometheus corresponds to the original novel’s subtitle. But, what does Prometheus
represents? In Greek mythology issues, he was the Titan that created mankind,
and Frankenstein’s Victor would come to represent this superhuman power. But Prometheus' relation to the novel can also be
interpreted in different ways. For example, regarding to Mary Shelley, Prometheus
was far from a hero (as would a traditional mythology point of view), she
thought of him as an evil. For Romanticism poets, “Prometheus'
gift to man was compared with the two great utopian promises of the 18th
century: the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution,
containing both great promise and potentially unknown horrors.”
If we are to analyse the
name of its character, ‘Victor’, we would say that a possible relationship of
this name is found in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a poem which
influenced Shelley widely, even more, we can find some words of this poem open
the novel Frankenstein and still Shelley let the monster read it. In Paradise Lost,
Apart from Shelley, we
find through the figure of John William Polidori how
he represents a progenitor of the romantic vampire genre in fantasy fiction,
across his short novel The Vampyre, which was first published one year
after Frankenstein, in 1819,
by Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine
with the false attribution ‘A Tale by Lord Byron’. The name of
the work's antagonist, ‘Lord Ruthven’, added to this assumption, for
that name was originally used in Lady Caroline Lamb's
novel Glenarvon, in which a thinly-disguised Byron figure was also named Lord Ruthven.
Despite repeated denials by Byron and Polidori, the
authorship often went unclarified.
The novel was successful, the Byron attribution might have help, and because
it dealt in a wide range with gothic horrors which entertained the readers, they demanded it at that
age. Polidori transformed the vampire from a
character in folklore
into the form we recognize today - an aristocratic fiend who preys among high
society.
The story has its origins in the summer of 1816 too, as we have seen
above. Polidori
was inspired by the story of Byron and in ‘two or
three idle mornings’ he produced The Vampyre.
As Shelley did, Polidori's work had a huge impact
on contemporary sensibilities and it starred numerous editions and translations.
An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard’s novel, Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires,
falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who
himself then wrote his own version, Le Vampire, a play which had
enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. Edgar Allan Poe,
Gogol, Alexandre Dumas
and Tolstoy
all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's
tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's
Dracula
and eventually the whole vampire genre.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampyre
6. Conclusion (by Manuela Elisa Blanes Monllor, Mª Llanos García
Martínez & Krysia Cogollos Latham-Koenig)