Making extensive use of untranslated texts, Arnold Schmidt discusses the impact of Byron's life and works on the discourse of Italian nationalism between 1818 and 1948, his participation in Grand Tour and salon culture, and his influence on Italian Classicists and Romantics.
Winner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize 2018 Byron in Italy – Venetian debauchery, Roman sight-seeing, revolution, horse-riding and swimming, sword-brandishing and pistol-shooting, the poet’s ‘last attachment’ – forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron’s time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy’s sense of itself as a nation, to Europe’s perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism across Europe. In this volume, Byron scholars from Britain, Europe and beyond re-assess the topic of ‘Byron and Italy’ in all its richness and complexity. They consider Byron’s relationship to Italian literature, people, geography, art, religion and politics, and discuss his navigations between British and Italian identities.
The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron offers the latest in critical thinking about the poet that defined the Romantic era across Europe and beyond. The volume presents forty-four groundbreaking essays that enable readers to assess Lord Byron's central position in Romantic traditions and his profound and far-reaching influence on British, European, and world culture. The chapters are organized into five sections-'Works', 'Biographical Contexts', 'Literary and Cultural Contexts', 'Afterlives', and 'Reading Byron Now'-that guide readers through the most important issues and frameworks for interpreting Byron. 'Works' presents original readings of Byron's key works and many of his lesser-known ones, giving space to extensive studies of his great epic, Don Juan, and the poem that brought him fame, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'Biographical Contexts' invites readers to consider Byron's life through key themes and patterns. 'Literary and Cultural Contexts' sets out the most important intellectual traditions from which Byron's work emerged and in which it developed. 'Afterlives' shows readers the extent of Byron's influence on literature, art, music, and politics in Europe and beyond. 'Reading Byron Now' advances the critical agendas that are shaping Byron Studies today. The Handbook tackles key themes associated with Byron including the Byronic Hero, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, sexuality, mobility, scepticism, the Gothic, celebrity culture, and much more. For new readers of Byron, the volume provides an excellent grounding in his life and work, and for specialists, it opens up exciting new approaches to an icon of Romantic literature.
Byron and Italy tackles a subject to which no book has been devoted exclusively since the early 1940s. Peter Cochran writes not just about Byron’s relationships with Italian literature, not just about his relationships with Italian women, and not just about his relationship with Italian politics. He writes about Byron’s relationship with Italy as a whole, seeing the poet’s sojourn in Italy as a vain attempt to forge a new identity for himself. Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date research, including his own as editor of Teresa Guiccioli’s Lord Byron’s Life in Italy and the diary of John Cam Hobhouse, Cochran traces numerous threads of evidence showing how the critical reception Byron’s poetry received from Italian critics gave him a new sense of self-worth, and how his experience of Italian Carnival, and of the Italian mock-heroic tradition in verse, gave him a new idea of who he was, and of what poetry was about. Among much else, the book includes new material on the Carbonari and on Byron’s reading of Ugo Foscolo, and an appendix containing translations of all known Italian and Austrian police-reports on Byron and his entourage.
Byron exists in two incompatible dimensions: as fully-documented history, and as romantic myth. Often the myth predominates, describing him as a passionate lover, a staunch friend, a great romantic poet, a champion of the working man, a loyal author to his publisher, and a fighter for democracy who sacrificed his life for the Freedom of Greece. This book attempts to prove that the verifiable truth often proves him to be the opposite. Using letters from Byron’s family, friends, and associates which have never been transcribed, collected and sequenced before, Peter Cochran argues that the poet was an unscrupulous sponger on his relatives and friends, that he harboured a horror at the idea of empowering the working man, had no time for democracy, and despised his publisher. His contempt for the Greeks is clear from everything he writes about them, and his motives for going to Greece at the end of his life (which Cochran analyses in more depth than they have ever been analysed before), were a disturbing mixture of self-indulgent fantasy and death-wish. Using large amounts of manuscript evidence, Cochran further argues that almost all editions of Byron’s writing do his style very poor service, constituting not contributions to knowledge of him, but additions to the obfuscating myth.
'It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object - the very poetry of politics. Only think - a free Italy!!! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus.' So wrote Lord Byron in his journal, in February 1821, only days before the outbreak of revolution in Greece, where three years later he would die in the service of the revolutionary cause. For a poet whose life and work are interlaced with action of multiple sorts, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to Byron's engagement with issues of politics. This volume brings together the work of eminent Byronists from seven European countries and the USA to re-assess the evidence. What did Byron mean by the 'poetry of politics'? Was he, in any sense, a 'political animal'? Can his final, fateful involvement in Greece be understood as the culmination of earlier, more deeply rooted quests? The first part of the book examines the implications of reading and writing as themselves political acts; the second interrogates the politics inherent or implied in Byron's poems and plays; the third follows the trajectory of his political engagement (or non-engagement), from his abortive early career in the British House of Lords, via the Peninsular War in Spain to his involvement in revolutionary politics abroad.
This interdisciplinary collection explores the divergence or convergence of freedom and terror in a range of Byron's works. Challenging the binary opposition of historicism and critical theory, it combines topical debates in a manner that is sensitive both to the circumstances of their emergence and to their relevance for the twenty-first century.
In her study of the relationship between Byron’s lifelong interest in historical matters and the development of history as a discipline, Carla Pomarè focuses on drama (the Venetian plays, The Deformed Transformed), verse narrative (The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa) and dramatic monologue (The Prophecy of Dante), calling attention to their interaction with historiographical and pseudo-historiographical texts ranging from monographs to dictionaries, collections of apophthegms, autobiographies and prophecies. This variety of discourses, Pomarè suggests, not only served as a source of the historical information Byron cherished, providing the subject matter for countless episodes in his works, but also and primarily supplied him with epistemological models. From them, Byron drew such trademark textual practices as his massive use of notes and paratexts, which satisfied his ingrained need for ’authenticity’ - a sentiment expressed in his oft-quoted, ’I hate things all fiction’. As Pomarè argues, Byron’s meticulous tracing of the process that links events, documents and historical representations ultimately answers his desire to retrieve what might be lost during the transmission of historical knowledge. Thus does he betray his preoccupation with the ideological uses of history writing, projecting his own discourses of history into the present of their composition.