Byron Society of America Sessions MLA Convention, San Francisco 27 and 28 December 2008

Abstract

n December 2008, for the first time, the Byron Society of America organised not one but two sessions at the MLA Convention. The first session investigated connections between Byron and popular culture. This topic built on several recent studies that have sought to link Byron with the popular culture of his own time, as well as tracing later manifestations of Byronic sensibilities, themes and ideas. From Francis Wilson's collection Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture (1999), to the coda of Fiona MacCarthy's 2002 biography and the exhibition she curated at the National Portrait Gallery, to Atara Stein's study of The Byronic Hero in Fiction, Film and Television (2004), a number of Byron's critics have begun to pay useful attention to popular culture. The session was entitled 'Byron and/as/in Popular Culture', and took place at the San Francisco Hilton on Saturday 27 December. In choosing this title, with its unlovely hybrid conjunction, the aim was to identify three distinct ways in which this area of interest might be extended in new and productive directions: firstly, by exploring Byron's lifelong engagement with popular culture, from boxing to pantomimes; secondly, by thinking about the circulation of his works among a popular audience; thirdly, by engaging with the ways in which Byron and his works were appropriated and redeployed in popular texts. The three papers presented on the panel engaged in different but complementary ways with this topic. Susan Wolfson (Princeton) gave a paper called 'Picturing Celebrity: Byron, West, and LEL', which examined Benjamin West's portrait of Byron (the last formal portrait to be taken from life) and Letitia Landon's poetic responses to it. She showed how West represented an older Byron, tending to plumpness, who was out of step with the popular conception of the poet fostered by the Oriental Tales and the portraits by Thomas Phillips and Richard Westall. Landon's strategy when writing an ekphrasis on this image was to try to discover the earlier, more 'Romantic' Byron beneath the surface, as it were. In the process, she positioned herself both as an outstanding reader of Byron and as his true successor. Mark Shoenfield (Vanderbilt) offered a reading of Byron's relationship with The Satirist and other contemporary satirical periodicals in a paper called 'The Culture of Comparison: Byron in The Satirist'. He was especially interested in Byron's relationship with Hewson Clarke, who attacked Byron early on and was attacked in turn in English Bards. Schoenfield has immersed himself in the periodical writing of the period and his research has unearthed some wonderful examples of satirical swipes at Byron in the periodical press. Particularly entertaining were the mock applications for the post of Poet Laureate from Byron and Wordsworth, which appeared in The Satirist after Henry Pye's death left the post vacant in 1813. Finally, Dino Felluga (Purdue), who spoke on behalf of himself and Emily Allen about their joint research, gave a paper called 'The Sensation of Byron'. It examined Byron's appearance in the sensation novel of the mid-nineteenth century, focusing especially on Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864), a rewriting of Flaubert's Madame Bovary adapted for the sensation genre. …