“A Nameless Sort of Person”? Mobility and the Policing of Identity in Byron’s Italian Years

Abstract

ABSTRACT Romantic-period studies have been keenly sensitive to the notion of mobility across borders, both in literal and figurative terms, investigating it in relation to issues of personal and national identity. This essay discusses Byron’s various forms of border-crossing with specific reference to his Italian years, starting with the most immediate loco-geographic meaning of the term, that is, Byron’s traversing the many frontiers that marked the Italian territory, partitioned in a plurality of states. The focus is on Byron’s experience of the technologies of control which were set into place in the early nineteenth century, testified by his traveling papers and registered, often with a touch of humor, in his correspondence. Byron’s musings on the practices and implications of the documentary control of mobility and identity spilled over, in a more serious key, into the concerns of his poetic output, notably in the lines of his 1819 lyric “To the Po.” Translating the notion of borders and border-crossing onto the page, here Byron resisted the crystallizing of identity at work in the biopolitical domain by making the fluidity of the history-laden river Po the locus of his rebirth as transnational subject.