Byron and Weltliteratur

The ageing Goethe was fascinated with Byron whom he called the greatest poetic talent. Though suspicious of Byron’s Philhellenism, Goethe found in Byron an openness to encounter non-English cultures, an attentiveness to national histories and in interest in the relationship of the individual to social life. Byron’s self-contextualising, self-historicising narrative poems constitute a parallel to Goethe’s own literary campaigns for cross-cultural engagement in the 1810s and 1820s and, despite Byron’s alienation from England, offer hope for the prospects of what Goethe was to call “world literature”.

A Marginal Interest? Byron and the Fine Arts

Byron has always been regarded as the possessor of a tin ear when it came to art. But once he took up residence on the Continent in 1816 he could hardly avoid paintings, especially when fellow-travellers like John Polidori, John Cam Hobbhouse and Stendhal insisted on showing him the galleries full of Flemish art in Belgium or Italian old masters in Milan, Venice, Florence and Rome.The essay works out what exactly he saw in all these places, and comments on what he had to say. In particular, it draws together an ‘Italian composite’ of feminine portraits, and ponders the question whether it is style or subject that we respond to in painting.

‘I ask his pardon for a postscript’: Byron’s Epistolary Afterthoughts

Signing off his letters always involved a type of lingering for Byron and an opportunity of reflecting on the just-completed letter. The voice comes from the same man, and yet simultaneously from somewhere else.In the light of these speculations, this essay intends to examine a range of Byron’s postscripts from correspondence written throughout his life in order to explore the various ways in which they ironically subvert, superintend, supplement, gloss or reinscribe the construction of his character in the main body of his letters. Examples of marginalised inscription are treated as a type of paratext that – unlike the marginalia in the poems – has never been considered at any length and, rather like Derrida’s supplement, bespeaks a dual addition to and subtraction from the composing self.

At the Margins of Romanticism: The Women of Don Juan’s English Cantos

The essay uses the women of the English Cantos of Don Juan to tease out the debate on Byron’s position on the margins of Romanticism relative to Neo-Classical or Romantic expectations. The essay also raises the question whether Byron’s Romanticism is ironised out of existence and whether his Neo-Classicism is as straightforward a return to Popean satire as it might on occasion seem. The three main female characters, Adeline, Aurora and Fitz-Fulke help the reader to focus on these questions, since the whole tissue of the English Cantos returns to them time and again and underlines the fact that the experience of reading Don Juan is often paradoxically elegiac, for all its humour and sense of the energy of life.

The Margins of Genius: Byron, Nationalism and the Periodical Reviews

This is a case study of the intricate conflict at the margins of genius and celebrity and the intersection of high and low culture in the Romantic period. The main focus is on accounts of Byron and his relationship with fame and genius in literary periodicals, most prominently Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the London Magazine during the period of 1818 to 1824. The main argument of the essay is that the vast amount of attention awarded to the concept of genius, combined with the heightened sense of nationalism in this period, caused critics to view genius as a national property wasted by Byron in his search for celebrity

Byron and Romantic Period Neoclassicism

In accordance with David Hume’s sceptical philosophy of identity, Byron is considered to be a chameleon and a typical border crosser of his age. Commuting between the progressivist Augustan Neoclassicism of the old school and Romanticism of the new heretical school, Byron shows his indebtedness to the Classical Tradition and endorses the artistry of formal Augustan verse-making, schooled on Horace, Dryden, and Pope. In this respect, Byron belongs to a coterie of famous code switchers between Classicism and Romanticism who wavered in their political allegiance between liberalism and conservatism and consequently eluded neat classifications.

Reshaping the Romantic Canon from the Margins: The Medial Construction of ‘Byron’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Byron has always been considered to belong to the canon of Romantic literature, but the place he occupies in the canon has been a special and recently a marginalised one. Byron’s phenomenal success and his special position within literary history is mainly the result of what is called the medial construction of “Byron”. The melancholic Byronic hero of the earlier works together with the narrative voice lead to rhetorical constructions of “Byron” that easily cross authorial and medial boundaries and turn into the Byronic vampire in Polidori’s novella, in the theatre and in the opera. In this reading of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron is shown as the construct of medial and public perception.

Byron and the Good Death

The essay argues that throughout his writing life Byron was fascinated by the margin of life: the moment of death. For Byron and his heroes, looking squarely at other people’s deaths is understood to signify and promote a kind of moral fortitude. Byron’s verse, however, often elides the moment of death, offering no description of it, but offering instead an aposiopesis – a rhetorical break that allows the moment of death to disappear into the texture of the verse. The essay investigates how Byron operates at the margins of life and also at the margins of language, suggesting that those margins become central to his poetry.

At the Margins of Europe: Byron’s East Revisited and The Giaour

Greece, in Byron’s work and life, seems so central, so symbolically tied to ideas of freedom and commitment, that it is easy to forget how marginal Greece was in the Europe of Byron’s time. Byron’s East is an anomalous composite, framed by four elements: the imperial force of the Ottoman Empire, the framing structure of classical Greece, a loosely defined Albanian presence operating both within the limits of the Ottoman Empire, but in some ways resistant to it, and what can be described as ‘modern Greece’. In reconstructing this network of Turkish/European oppositional attitudes, we can see with greater clarity how Byron approached his Giaour and to what extent Byron’s difficulties in escaping from the traditional representation of classical Greece are only partially resolved in Childe Harold.

‘Like a Flash of Inspiration’: Byron’s Marginalised Lyricism in Hebrew Melodies

Despite intensive critical work on Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, they tend to be marginalised in Byron’s work. While there is a great deal of art in Byron’s lyrics, they often have an effect of a flash of inspiration. The essay (re-)examines the lyric art and imaginative force of poems frequently marginalised in accounts of Byron’s poetic career, involving comparisons with the lyricism of other poets, including Wordsworth, Shelley and Moore. Moore’s relations with Ireland are evident, Byron’s with Jewish suffering are less so, except that in his act of virtuosic empathy he can summon up Biblical cadences and imply an obscure, but deep link between apparently remote subject matter and private feeling.