Report on the 29th International Byron Conference

Abstract

The 29th International Byron Conference was held at University of Liverpool between 19th and 24th of August 2003. It opened with a welcome session in main lecture theatre of 1830s building of Liverpool Medical Institute. This is a very fine, wood-panelled and balconied theatre-very like, I imagine, kind of lecture theatre in which Coleridge and Hazlitt would have given their lectures. The conference was officially got under way with addresses by Professor Philip Davis (Head of English at Liverpool), Professor Drummond Bone (Liverpool's Vice- Chancellor) and Mr Ron Gould (Lord Mayor of Liverpool). The conference theme was 'Byron and Good Life', with a minor theme of 'Byron and Sea'. Vincent Newey (Leicester) got discussion of 'Byron and Good Life' off to an excellent start with 'Good Life, Bad Life: Byron, Dickens and Adventure of Georg Simmel'. Uncovering numerous hidden quotations from and references to Byron across Dickens's work, Newey argued that Dickens's critique of English aristocracy was mainly based on his reading of Norman Abbey cantos of Don Juan. Acknowledging a fundamental difference between Byronic celebration of 'the classical body' in Childe Harold IV and rather more Dickensian province of 'the grotesque body', Newey nevertheless uncovered traces of former in account of Steerforth's death in David Copperfield, suggesting that death of Steerforth in some ways depicts nineteenth-century death of Byronism. The first panel of conference was opened by Corinna Russell (Cambridge). Her paper, 'Reading the moral of all human tales: Childe Harold IV and Wreck of Good Life', carefully distinguished between ethical and moral and argued that Byron's understanding of morality was not primarily to do with interior intents but with public realm of actions. Shobhana Bhattacharji (Delhi) spoke on complexities involved in reading Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. She argued that meaning of poem is bound up with its gaps and with silences, and that reader picks up more of permanent paradoxes of poem than they can wholly explain. This, she demonstrated, is part of difficulty of Childe Harold. After a five minute mid-session break (an innovation much appreciated by delegates), Paul M. Curtis (Moncton-and organiser of next year's International Conference, on 'Byron and Sublime', to be held at his university) and Michael O'Neill (Durham) gave their papers. Curtis's 'Prophecy and Prophetic in Byron's Poetry and Drama' was concerned with Byron's relationship with prophetic tradition and prophetic habits of mind. Michael O'Neill's paper, 'A Stalking Oracle: Beppo and Good' made an interesting distinction between 'attention' and 'curiosity', then contrasted 'attention' with what O'Neill argued is pure 'curiosity' of Beppo-a curiosity through which selfconsciousness is lost and world is simply relished. In afternoon we moved to University's Senate Room for another four-paper session. First we heard Tony Howe (Cambridge) speak on 'Byron's The Island and Choice of Good Lives' and David Roessel, winner of Elma Dangerfield Prize for In Byron's Shadow, on 'Seeking a Soldier's Grave: Byron and a Good Death'. Tony Howe bravely declared that ending of The Island is flawed. David Roessel showed how Tennessee Williams made a play out of image of Byron's heroic death in Greece without, it seems, knowing anything about poet at all. After break, Gavin Hopps (Aachen) gave a fine paper on what he called Byron's 'porousness' that distinguished between Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in which Byron constantly moves outwards, towards and into space and art works, and Don Juan, where Byron does opposite and brings a whole metaphysical world into Norman Abbey and Aurora Raby. Hopps's distinctive terminology-the 'porous', 'penetrable' and 'leaky' were some of his terms-echoed through rest of conference. …