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Originally Posted by victauria
fantasyfan...thanks for talking about the scholarly edition. It does sound pretty interesting, and might be a big help in liking it more, or at least relating to it more.
Is the idea of suicide creating vampires addressed, do you recall? (That one still just baffles me....)
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The link between suicide and vampirism is associated with folk beliefs. Here's a snippet from Wikipedia on the subject:
"The notion of vampirism has existed for millennia; cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of demons and spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. However, despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity we know today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early-18th-century southeastern Europe, when verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published.
In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but they can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire. Belief in such legends became so pervasive that in some areas it caused mass hysteria and even public executions of people believed to be vampires."
The introduction to the Scholarly Edition does say that Le Fanu was drawing from folk traditions as well as the Byronic tradition--which is the one with which we are most familiar.
Concerning this introduction--If you download a free sample of the book to your Kindle I suspect that you'll get a good chunk of it.