After Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking work on the history of madness in Madness and Civilization (trans. 1965), what may be viewed as a new field of literary criticism arose: studies that explore literary representations of insanity. With a focus on critical studies about British literature and medicine of the long eighteenth century, this chapter will demonstrate the range of work that has shaped this field, draw special attention to those studies that investigate the phenomenon of physicians who were also literary writers, and interrogate the ethical implications that arise when doctors contribute to the belles-lettres. With respect to this final point, the negative implications of this practice become clear in consideration of its triangulated relationship with two other increasingly important developments in Romantic-era medicine and literature: the development of psychology as a medical specialty and the popularity of the case history. This chapter interrogates the ethics of physicians’ literary use of patient information to suggest that this singular moment in literary history presented the potential for a uniquely predatory relationship between the creative writer and the often real-life subject about whom he wrote. The case of John Polidori, Lord Byron’s doctor during the 1816 summer of the Villa Diodati, and author of The Vampyre (1819) and Ernestus Berchtold (1819), poses such challenging questions about the ethical responsibilities of the physician-cum-literary writer.

Legends about the vampire and the development of Gothic fiction took separate tracks throughout the eighteenth century in England and the rest of Europe. But they united decisively in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (composed 1799–1800; published 1816), which then inspired the more symbolic uses of the vampire-figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). These works showed that the vampire could be a symbolic site for ‘abjecting’ (in Julia Kristeva’s sense of ‘throwing-off’) the most feared inconsistencies and conflicts at the heart of individuals and their whole culture. From there, this mating of fictive schemes, empowered by the Janus-faced nature of Gothic symbol-making, proliferated across the nineteenth century in plays, penny dreadfuls and fully-fledged novels. As these versions of the Gothic vampire progressed, so the range of deep conflicts that this figure could abject, individual and social, grew exponentially, as we can still see in texts ranging from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Charles Nodier’s French plays in the 1810s and 1820s to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire in the 1890s.

This chapter investigates the ‘cosmopolitan Gothic’ collection of German ghost stories brought together in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès’s French translation Fantasmagoriana (1812) and Mary Shelley’s English Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein (1818; 1831). The first section of the chapter explores the German provenance of Fantasmagoriana as these ghost stories travelled between European cultures in the early nineteenth century. The second section examines the historical context of popular magic-lantern shows and storytelling, in particular the phenomenon of the phantasmagoria, musing on its possible influence on the famous ghost storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati in June 1816. The final section considers the influence of particular ghost stories in Fantasmagoriana on the composition of Mary Shelley’s novel.

This chapter surveys the literary achievements of the group of writers who gathered together on the banks of Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Polidori; and Lord Byron. Beginning with the famous ghost storytelling competition proposed by Byron, it considers the extent to which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while located in the earlier tradition of Radcliffean romance, forged new directions for the Gothic mode through its graphic realisation of corporeal and textual monstrosity. While it forces us to reconsider notions of origin and influence among the group, Polidori’s The Vampyre, the chapter argues, bequeathed to the Gothic its own ‘monstrous progeny’. Engaging with, and thoroughly revising, the earlier poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Byron, for their part, set in place some of the distinctive features of second-generation Romanticism, even if the works that they produced during this period force us to interrogate the critical distinction between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’ itself.