| الوصف: |
The connections between the short story The Vampyre, and Italy are numerous. First and foremost, of course, we have Polidori's family heritage. Born in London in 1795 to the expatriate Gaetano, John William Polidori was the eldest son in a family of intense literary activity, in which the passion for the Italian language and culture had remained very much alive. Much has been said about the complicated composition and publication history of Polidori's celebrated story, especially regarding its relationship with Lord Byron and the company at Villa Diodati. Fabio Camilletti (2020) and Nick Groom (2022) have offered crucial, and to me, conclusive, insights on the troubled genesis of Polidori's work and its even more troubled editorial history. Perpetuo desìo proposes some reflection on the metacultural significance of The Vampyre and reconstruct its first Italian reception, starting from a simple observation. The numerous critics who have dealt with the European reception of Polidori's work agree in attributing a seminal role to this text, characterised by an almost biological capacity (Bortolotti & Hutcheon, 2007) of cultural adaptation. While the posthumous reception of The Vampyre is well documented beyond the Alps, I was surprised to see that Italy hardly appears in these comparative investigations, as if the success and influence of Polidori's text had only scathingly touched the Italian peninsula. Despite the dearth of systematised critical studies, is it conceivable, I wonder, that Italy was truly impermeable to the influence of a figure such as the vampire created by Polidori, a character that immediately became a mythos, a transcultural and transmedia European phenomenon, and a true seme of our own modernity? Also, how does such an ‘explosive’ text, in Lotman's definition (1992; Eng. vers. 2009), such as Polidori's, fit into the composite political and cultural mosaic of early nineteenth-century Italy? |
