Byronic Measures: Enacting Lordship in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Marino Faliero

Abstract

Jerome Christensen construes " Lord Byron's Strength " as a singular capacity for "consequential action" in a socio-historical situation in which, as Lukács' says, the "commodity form" has become "total." I question Christensen's characterization of the pan-textualizing consequences of Byronic action, and offer readings of Childe Harold and Marino Faliero that show how it remains beholden to an epistemological project not unlike the commodifying function it ostensibly repudiates. But I follow Christensen in attempting to offer an account of characteristically Byronic action in terms not of what it is but what it does. To this end I focus upon the specific function of canonical allusion in the dramatic action of Faliero, in Byronic writing and reading, as well as the pirating of Byron's works.