Vampire literature covers the spectrum of literary work concerned principally with the subject of vampires. The literary vampire first appeared in 18th-century poetry, before becoming one of the stock figures of gothic fiction with the publication of Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), inspired by a story told to him by Lord Byron. Later influential works include The Family of the Vourdalak (1839) by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy; the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1847); Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a lesbian vampire Carmilla (1872), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Some authors created a more "sympathetic vampire", with Varney being the first,Lisa A. Nevárez (2013). The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead". p. 125. McFarland and more recent examples such as Moto Hagio's series The Poe Clan (1972–1976) and Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire (1976) proving influential.
History
18th century Vampire fiction is rooted in the "vampire craze" between the 1720s and 1730s, which culminated in the official exhumations of the suspected vampires Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Paole in Serbia under the Habsburg monarchy.
Heinrich August Ossenfelder is attributed with introducing the theme of vampires into creative literature with the short German poem The Vampire (Der vampir) in 1748. The poem was written as a commission for the scientific journal The Natural Scientist (Der Naturforscher) to accompany an article about vampire reports. The poem has strong erotic overtones: a man whose love is rejected by a respectable and pious maiden threatens to pay her a nightly visit, drink her blood by giving her the seductive kiss of the vampire and thus prove to her that his teaching is better than her mother's Christianity.An English translation, by Aloysius Gibson, appears in The Vampire in Verse: An Anthology, ed. Steven Moore (Chicago: Adams Press, 1985), p. 12.
There have been a number of tales about a dead person returning from the grave to visit his/her beloved or spouse and bring them death in a way or another, the narrative poem Lenore (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger being an example (though the apparently returned lover is actually revealed to be death himself in disguise). One of its lines, Denn die Todten reiten schnell ("For the dead ride fast"), was to be quoted in Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. A later German poem exploring the same subject with a prominent vampiric element was The Bride of Corinth (1797) by Goethe, a story about a young woman who returns from the grave to seek her betrothed:
19th century The first mention of vampires in English literature appears in Robert Southey's monumental oriental epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), where the main character Thalaba's deceased beloved Oneiza turns into a vampire, although that occurrence is actually marginal to the story. It has been argued that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Christabel (written between 1797 and 1801, but not published until 1816) has influenced the development of vampire fiction: the heroine Christabel is seduced by a female supernatural being called Geraldine who tricks her way into her residence. Though Coleridge never finished the poem, some argue that his intended plot had Geraldine eventually trying to marry Christabel after having assumed the appearance of Christabel's absent lover.Leatherdale, C. (1993) Dracula: The Novel and the Legend:46–9. The story bears a remarkable resemblance to the overtly vampiric story of Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872).
In a passage in his epic poem The Giaour (1813), Lord Byron alludes to the traditional folkloric conception of the vampire as a being damned to suck the blood and destroy the life of its nearest relations:
But first, on earth as vampire sent, Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent: Then ghostly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife, At midnight drain the stream of life; Yet loathe the banquet which perforce Must feed thy livid living corpse: Thy victims ere they yet expire Shall know thy demon for their sire, As cursing thee, thou cursing them, Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
Byron also composed an enigmatic fragmentary story, published as "A Fragment" in 1819 as part of the Mazeppa collection, concerning the mysterious fate of an aristocrat named Augustus Darvell whilst journeying in the Orient—as his contribution to the famous ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, between him, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori (who was Byron's personal physician). This story provided the basis for The Vampyre (1819) by Polidori. Byron's own wild life became the model for Polidori's undead protagonist Lord Ruthven. According to A. Asbjorn Jon, "the choice of name [for Polidori's Lord Ruthven] is presumably linked to Lady Caroline Lamb's earlier novel Glenarvon, where it was used for a rather ill disguised Byronesque character".A. Asbjorn Jon (2003) 'Vampire Evolution', in Metaphor 3, 2003: 19–23.
An unauthorized sequel to Polidori's tale by Cyprien Bérard called Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires (1820) was attributed to Charles Nodier. Nodier himself adapted "The Vampyre" into the first vampire stage melodrama, Le Vampire. Unlike Polidori's original story, Nodier's play was set in Scotland. This, in turn, was adapted by the English melodramatist James Planché as The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles (1820) at the Lyceum (then called the English Opera House), also set in Scotland. Planché introduced the "vampire trap" as a way for the title fiend to appear in a dream at the beginning and then to vanish into the earth at his destruction. Nodier's play was also the basis of an opera called Der Vampyr by the German composer Heinrich Marschner, who set the story in a more plausible Wallachia. Planché, in turn, translated the libretto of this opera into English in 1827, where it was performed at the Lyceum also. Alexandre Dumas, père later redramatized the story in a play also entitled Le Vampire (1851). Another theatrical vampire of this period was "Sir Alan Raby", who is the lead character of The Vampire (1852), a play by Dion Boucicault. Boucicault himself played the lead role to great effect, though the play itself had mixed reviews. Queen Victoria, who saw the play, described it in her diary as "very trashy".David J. Skal (2001) Vampires: Encounters With The Undead: 47–8.
An important later example of 19th-century vampire fiction is the penny dreadful epic Varney the Vampire (1847), featuring Sir Francis Varney as the vampire. In this story, we have the first example of the standard trope in which the vampire comes through the window at night and attacks a maiden as she lies sleeping. Alexandre Dumas' 1849 novella The Pale Lady features the first Carpathian vampire nobleman, a young Moldavian noble and outlaw named Kostaki. Kostaki is a descendant of the Wallachian Brancoveanu family, can hypnotise, and he sneaks into a maiden's chamber to make her follow him into his tomb. His bite can kill and turn a victim into a vampire within 15 days, unless that person washes the bite wounds with his vampire blood. Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) is suspected of being a vampire by his housekeeper at one point, which he immediately laughs off as "absurd nonsense".
Fascinating erotic fixations are evident in Sheridan Le Fanu's classic novella Carmilla (1872), which features a female vampire with lesbian inclinations who seduces the heroine Laura while draining her of her vital fluids. Le Fanu's story is set in the Duchy of Styria. Such central European locations became a standard feature of vampire fiction.
Another important example of the development of vampire fiction can be found in three seminal novels by Paul Féval: Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1860), La Vampire (1865) and La Ville Vampire (1874). Marie Nizet's Le Capitaine Vampire (1879) features a Russian officer, Boris Liatoukine, who is a vampire, embodying Russian imperialism in 1877 Romania.
In German literature, one of the most popular novels was Hans Wachenhusen's Der Vampyr – Novelle aus Bulgarien (1878), which, on account of the author's first-hand experience of Ottoman society, includes a detailed description of the multicultural society of Bulgaria, and which contains an atmosphere that is "in some parts comparable to Dracula".J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, Visible Ink Press, 2010, p. 287.
The most famous Serbian vampire was Sava Savanović, from a folklore-inspired novel, Ninety Years Later, by Milovan Glišić, first published in 1880.Glišić, Milovan, "Posle devedeset godina" (Ninety Years Later). Serbian vampires—albeit depicted first in French (1839) and then Russian (1884)—also appear in Count Tolstoy's novella The Family of the Vourdalak.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published the short story "Manor" in 1885, about two sailors and lovers. When the older of the two, Manor, drowns at sea he returns to his lover Har each night to suck his blood and lay together.
Dracula Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Britain where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.
Although it has been claimed that the character of Count Dracula is based upon Vlad Draculesti III (Vlad the Impaler), also known as Vlad Ţepeş', a notorious 15th-century Wallachian (Romanian) warlord, or Voivode, this has been debunked by multiple scholars. Unlike the historical personage, however, Stoker located his Count Dracula in a castle near the Borgo Pass in Transylvania, and ascribed to that area the supernatural aura it retains to this day in the popular imagination.
Stoker likely drew inspiration from Irish myths of blood-sucking creatures. He was also influenced by Le Fanu's Carmilla. Le Fanu was Stoker's editor when Stoker was a theater critic in Dublin, Ireland. Like Le Fanu, Stoker created compelling female vampire characters such as Lucy Westenra and the Brides of Dracula.
Stoker's vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing was a strong influence on subsequent vampire literature.
20th century
Though Stoker's Count Dracula remained an iconic figure, especially in the new medium of cinema, as in the film Nosferatu (1922), 20th-century vampire fiction went beyond traditional Gothic horror and explored new genres such as science fiction. An early example of this is Gustave Le Rouge's Le prisonnier de la planète Mars (1908) and its sequel La guerre des vampires (1909), in which a native race of bat-winged, blood-drinking humanoids is found on Mars. In the 1920 novella La Jeune Vampire (The Young Vampire), by J.-H. Rosny aîné, vampirism is explained as a form of possession by souls originating in another universe known simply as the Beyond.
Possibly the most influential example of modern vampire science fiction is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954). The novel is set in a future Los Angeles overrun with undead cannibalistic/bloodsucking beings. The protagonist is the sole survivor of a pandemic of a bacterium that causes vampirism. He must fight to survive attacks from the hordes of nocturnal creatures, discover the secrets of their biology, and develop effective countermeasures. The novel was adapted into three movies: The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price in 1964, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in 1971, and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in 2007.