Fantasmagoriana

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Fantasmagoriana

The title of a collection of popular stories in two volumes dealing mainly with apparitions and specters that was published in Paris in 1812. The contents were translated from the original German by Jean Baptiste Eyriès. Lord Byron read these stories aloud to Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (later Mrs. Shelley), Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Subsequently, Byron proposed that each member of the company, amid their ingestions of laudanum, attempt to write a ghost story. As a result Mary Wollstonecraft began her novel Frankenstein. Several years later Polidori expanded the story begun by Byron and turned it into the first modern vampire story, published as The Vampyr in 1819. These stories generated a whole genre of gothic literature with special reference to vampire themes.