Abstract:
In 1816, Lord Byron travelled to Switzerland with his physician John William Polidori. In Geneva they met Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. During one of the group’s evenings at the Villa Diodati, Byron challenged his friends: “We will each write a ghost story”. Mary Shelley would start Frankenstein, and Polidori, influenced by the challenge, would later write his novella The Vampyre. The young author also kept a journal of the voyage which would only be published in 1911. This paper deals with the author’s description of the trip, the group’s social gatherings in Geneva and with the identity of a mysterious Portuguese lady and her daughters whom Polidori met at the Countess of Bruce’s famous parties in Genthod.
(A digitized version of the first-edition of The Vampyre is available online at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/thevampyretale00poliuoft/mode/2up)

Biography:

Rogério Miguel do Deserto Rodrigues de Puga has an MA and PhD in Anglo-Portuguese Studies from the Universidade Nova (2006 and 2007 respectively), and a BA in Modern Languages and Literatures (Portuguese and English Studies) from the same University (1998). He was a Post-Doc Fellow at the University of Lisbon’s Centre for Comparative Studies (FCT grant, 2007), Assistant Professor at the University of Macao (2007-2009) and has been invited researcher/professor at several foreign universities. He is currently Associate Professor with Habilitation (“Agregação”) at Universidade Nova (NOVA-FCSH), where he teaches English contemporary literature, literary theory, travel writing, literary intermedialities and digital humanities, and children’s literature and young adult fiction. Prof. Puga has authored 86 articles, 53 book chapters, has published 22 books. He was awarded the Santander-Nova Research Internationalization Award 5 times and is a member of CETAPS, where he coordinates the Orientalism and (Post-)Colonial Anglo-Portuguese Relations strand.. He has published extensively on Sino-Western relations, namely Anglo-Portuguese relations in China, and on early British and North-American presence in China (Macao). He also promotes a wide range of outreach activities in cooperation with (inter)national museums, newspapers, tvs, libraries and schools.