I’ve written before about the Vampire Literary Canon—some of the most popular works that cemented the vampire’s place as literature’s favorite monster. But before vampires worked their way into novels (like Bram Stoker’s Dracula), novellas (like J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla), or even short stories (like Polidori’s “The Vampyre”), many of the earliest appearances of these creatures in Western literature occurred in poetry. Below are a few of my favorite examples of early vampire poems:
Around this time every year, I put together a mini syllabus of Gothic works commonly read in schools. If you missed them in the past, be sure to go back and check out my original Back to School Reading List and my Back to School Reading List: Short Story Edition. This time, I wanted to tackle some theater! Check out the five plays below that bring the Gothic to the stage:
1) Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Though Shakespeare was writing a good few centuries before the Gothic literary movement of the late 1700s, several of his works can be considered proto-Gothics—particularly Macbeth. I’ve discussed this in more detail during my post on The Gothic in Shakespeare, but Macbeth displays many motifs that would later become core tropes of the Gothic novel. For example, one of its main settings is a medieval castle; it features ghosts that have returned to address past wrongs; there are witches with ominous prophecies; and Lady Macbeth prefigures later female villains, both of the femme fatale variety and the Madwoman in the Attic. Many later Gothic writers were strongly influenced by Macbeth, including the author of the very first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole. Continue reading Back to School Reading List: Drama Edition
I’ve spoken many times on this blog about how the Gothic genre originated in England with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and I’ve gone on to enumerate many other early English writers of the Gothic, as well as several American authors that followed later on. But the Gothic was not limited to the English-speaking world. In fact, many of the early and influential pieces of Gothic literature originated in Continental Europe—specifically in Germany and France. Below, I’ve listed a few seminal works to take a broad look at the Gothic tradition in these two countries: Continue reading French and German Gothic
