/lit/ - Literature

You're probably on to something. I'm an ancient Chinese history major (yeah yeah) and you can track the various climate changes that occurred over there through their literature and art, specifically on how much it focuses on snow. I imagine something similar happened in Europe.

>>5021550
Hey op, what's this book about? No i'm not clicking the link i rather hear it from someone who's passionate about the book.

My great grandpa told me his grandpa told him all about it. He said it was four years after the big earthquake that made the mill stream dry up and everybody thought it was connected somehow and might be the end of the world coming. said game was scarce even down by Clay's Ferry and Boonesborough, but there was plenty of root crops, just starved out a lot of cattle and horses because the fodder never made and what did make molded. Also, the tobacco crop was ruined but that's all i can remember.

Isn't that the year the Shelleys and Byron went to the Italian villa where Mary wrote Frankenstein? I think it was, but the weather keeping them inside lead to vampires and modern monsters being big. Some lawyer published a rewriting of Byron's contribution to the competition under the title The Vampire irrc

>>5021550
Very interesting topic. What's pic related from btw?

>>5024125
literally deviantart

and some weird sci fi website

put it into the google nigger

>>5024118

It was Switzerland, at the Villa Diodati. The author of 'The Vampyre' was Byron's physician, John William Polidori, and people merely assumed it was a work of L.B., probably because of the similarities between him and the 'protagonist', Lord Ruthven.

Byron was actually furious to be associated with the text, because he thought it was terrible - he, and Shelley, also thought Polidori was an idiot (they called him 'Polly Dolly'), and wrote to his publisher - John Murray - to ensure the rumour was clearly put to bed. I'm quite sure no litigation followed.

>>5021550
Although it came later, Mary Shelley's Last Man conveys an anxiety that I expect can be conne td to 1816.

>>5024118
It was Polidori, Byron's personal physician.
It's not clear who wrote what first, there's Byron's "Fragments of a Vampire Novel", but it's only a fragment, it uses some of the same motifs Polidori uses. Polidori wrote a complete short story about vampires, but it sucks, he was a physician, not a writer (not that physicians can't make good writers, see Döblin or Schnitzler). England was so hungry for new stuff by Byron, that initially Polidori's short story was printed as a new story by Byron, I can't really believe people fell for it, because it is written really badly.

>>5024147
>>5024118

Oh, and Polidori probably did take elements from Byron's contribution to the ghost writing competition - I've read them both, it's really just 'vampirism' which they have in common. But, really, the biggest thing of Byron's which Polidori stole for his story was his personality itself.

>>5024163

It's pretty interesting that people had such an insatiable thirst for information on Byron. I suppose you'd have to be desperate to believe that the writer of 'Childe Harold' would choose to publish such a poor piece of work.

L.B. was pretty doubtful about even his best work. I think there was more than a few instances - Don Juan, perhaps Manfred - of him leaving the decision to publish squarely in the hands of John Murray.

But, then, people were taking holidays to peek in at the Villa Diodati. I read they were selling binoculars on the opposite shore of the lake.

>>5024164
>>5024154
>>5024147
Based anons for this refresher course. Gonna be watch Romantics documentaries for the rest of the night now:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNXopULYgW0

>>5024163
lol now I'm trying to name great physician writers: Checkhoff, Vyllyam Karles Vyllyamz, Sir Autist Konan Doily...

>>5024229
Celine. I guess being a doctor really gives you a contempt for mankind

>>5024214

If I can make a suggestion, and you're interested: Andre Maurois's 'Byron' is a bit of a biographical 'classic' - he also wrote an interesting summary of Voltaire, who observed another interesting phenomenon occasioned by an earthquake, the 1755 one is Lisbon.

Maurois has a pretty lengthy section about 1816 and its effect on Byron's writing, though it's more to do with the influence of Shelley (his Platonism and new-found interest in Wordsworth) on Byron's writing thereafter. I found it fascinating because before that I'd tended to compartmentalise the 'first' and 'second' wave Romantics in quite exclusive categories. But some of Byron's writing in 1816-17 could easily be mistaken for Wordsworth.

>>5024238
I will duly add it to the wish list, thanks

>>5024229

Conan Doyle? 'Great' is really pushing it.

>>5024176
He was a superstar, pretty much like Justin Bieber, only not retarded. Byron'S influence onf fashion can still be seen today, he popularized the neck-tie and the pin-stripe suit in more or less the same form as they are worn today.

>>5024164
I don't think stealing is the right word, it is not clear if he copied something Byron wrote or if it was the other way round. It's also not only vampirism they have in common. It's been a while since I've read them both, but IIRC, there's this whole "going to Greece and dieng there and having to be buried in a special way" thing both stories use.

>>5024266
lolz just sayin he was super-duper popular, sold a shyt-tonne of buhks, left a body of work inspiring tv shows a century l8er

Is he great "LITERATURE," in terms of psychological insight or quality of prose.....ehhhh nope, probs not. But girl could move paper on the market. And that is pretty great.

>>5024234
Never read Celine, so can't speak to zir work, but I always thought Checkhoff was super empathetic, which gave his stories their punch.

Shit got weird after he got TB and coughed blood all over Stanislavski's white table cloth...followed by a move to the country to write some grim, grim plays...but I think a terminal hacking cough can change a person's outlook.

Also Keats (tho the poor boy hardly got a chance to practice)
& Bulgakov, of whom Google informs me was also a doc.

Read Tim Powers "The Stress of Her Regard" for a very weird take on the whole thing.

>>5024234
Don't forget António Lobo Antunes

>>5021550
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1817_in_art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1816_in_art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1819_in_art

OP could also look at the visual record, see if anything interesting pops up. I'm not in love with what Wikipedia is showing, but then again Neo Classicism was also the rage of the day....I mean the early 19th century is interesting for Euro Lit b.c. of the birth of Romanticism, which includes the Gothic we're discussing...but that can be traced back to Wordsworth & Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798. . . . . . . .. . . . . . .

I'm thinking that the Year Without a Summer may have been too short a period to leave a definite imprint on the literary record, you might have more luck looking at more protracted lengths of cooling, like the LIttle Ice Age spanning the 16th-19th centuries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

>>5021550
the year Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death

The "red evenings" after the Krakatoa eruption inspired the scream.

The Santorini eruption basically ended Minoan civilization. The Egyptians were like "sheeet, them niggas must've pissed som gods of." 1000 years later they told Solon about it, but he was bad with big numbers and thought they said 10k years ago and all the way out in the Atlantic