This chapter investigates the ‘cosmopolitan Gothic’ collection of German ghost stories brought together in Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès’s French translation Fantasmagoriana (1812) and Mary Shelley’s English Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein (1818; 1831). The first section of the chapter explores the German provenance of Fantasmagoriana as these ghost stories travelled between European cultures in the early nineteenth century. The second section examines the historical context of popular magic-lantern shows and storytelling, in particular the phenomenon of the phantasmagoria, musing on its possible influence on the famous ghost storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati in June 1816. The final section considers the influence of particular ghost stories in Fantasmagoriana on the composition of Mary Shelley’s novel.

This chapter surveys the literary achievements of the group of writers who gathered together on the banks of Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Polidori; and Lord Byron. Beginning with the famous ghost storytelling competition proposed by Byron, it considers the extent to which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while located in the earlier tradition of Radcliffean romance, forged new directions for the Gothic mode through its graphic realisation of corporeal and textual monstrosity. While it forces us to reconsider notions of origin and influence among the group, Polidori’s The Vampyre, the chapter argues, bequeathed to the Gothic its own ‘monstrous progeny’. Engaging with, and thoroughly revising, the earlier poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Byron, for their part, set in place some of the distinctive features of second-generation Romanticism, even if the works that they produced during this period force us to interrogate the critical distinction between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’ itself.