SOURCE: "Dr. John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre," in Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticisms, edited by Deirdre Coleman and Peter Otto, Locust Hill Press, 1992, pp. 85-110.

In the following essay, Barbour uses Polidori's The Vampyre to explore the figure of the vampire in the Romantic literary imagination.

I want to generalize an idea of the Romantic Imagination, in a period example, and as a crisis in authorial self-representation. The dominant trope in John William Polidori's The Vampyre; a Tale (1819) is the agon between evenly-matched male protagonist and male antagonist. This turning plot has antecedents in classical mythology and Hebrew sacred story; even more important in English tradition is the Orphic and Hermetic belief in the travelling, flying or falling, sinking or rising, spirit which perpetuates itself across bodily and material entities and impediments, in a drive to fulfil its self-creating identity in material oblivion...