VAMPIRE FICTION - Early
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does point to the most important (indeed genre changing in some cases) innovations.
1800 - 'Wake Not the Dead' by Johann Ludwig Tiek The first known English vampire story.
1816 - 'Fragment of a Novel' by Lord Byron (George Gordon) This isn't exactly a novel. It's hardly even a story, but it is the first widely known example of the Vampire in English fiction.
1819 - 'The Vampyre' by Dr. John Polidori Everyone knows the story of this short story's conception by now, but to paraphrase: Lord Byron, Dr Polidori, and the Shelleys got together one night, and had a competition to write a horror story. The outcome of this was Byron's work written above, this by Polidori, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelly.
1828 - 'The Skeleton Count' by Elizabeth Grey The first ever vampire story written by a woman
1841 - 'Upyr' by Alexy Tolstoy Published in Paris, it is the first modern vampire story by a Russian
1845 - 'Varney the Vampyre' Series by James Malcolm Rymer These are a series of gothic horrors printed as "Penny Dreadfuls", written after the author was known to have associated with Elizabeth Grey. True classics.
1849 - 'The Pale Lady' by Alexandre Dumas & Paul Bocage This was the first book to be set in the now infamous Carpathian mountains.
1872 - 'Carmilla' by Sheridan Le Fanu A classic tale about an ambiguously seductive female vampire believed to have been inspired by Coleridge's poem 'Cristabel' and in turn later providing one of the sources Bram Stoker drew upon for 'Dracula'.
1887 - 'The Grave of Ethelind Fionguala' by Julian Hawthorne The first vampire story to be written by an American, and it is thought that Stoker had read this book before he wrote Dracula.
1890 - 'Let Loose' by Mary Cholmondelay The first book to feature "possession by the dead" (a vampire draining another persons life force to then be reborn in their body)
1894 - 'The Flowering of the Strange Orchid' by H.G. Wells A percursor to the vampire science fiction story.
1897 - 'Dracula' by Abraham Stoker Need I say more?
1897 - 'Dracula's Guest' by Abraham Stoker This was originally a part of the 'Dracula' manuscript and removed by the publisher to shorten its overall length. It was later published after Bram Stoker's death as a short story.
1903 - 'Grettir at Thorhall-stead' by Frank Norris First to have the undead animated by another's will (previously all vampires featured had been vampires already)
1911 - 'For the Blood is the Life' by F. Marion Crawford A well crafted offering from the popular romantic novelist.
1933 - 'Revelations in Black' by Carl Jacobi A classically gothic short story.
1937 - 'I, The Vampire' by Henry Kuttner The first to portray the vampire as a tragic victim of circumstance.
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Thanks to Shortgoth for much of the above list: Vampfic http://members.lycos.co.uk/shortgoth001
Other sources include Blood and Roses Anthology 19th Cent. Vampire Literature edited by Adele Olivia Gladwell and James Havoc
The Vampire in Verse 1985 edited by Steven Moore
And the handy: www.litgothic.com
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