The Celebrity of Exilic Romance: Francisco de Miranda and Lord Byron

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis comparative analysis argues that Lord Byron's celebrity, and the ways in which he sought to deploy it, was anticipated by Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816), the Venezuelan exile, adventurer, and revolutionary. Miranda inspired a type of transnational celebrity classified here as “exilic romance.” Defined by the appropriation and performance of several often contradictory identities, exilic romance operated as a living text, one that was being constantly edited, revised, and reinterpreted. Its many poses, which included the reinterpretation of courtly love, episodic adventure, and erotic symbolism, drew on literary genres (romance, picaresque, epic, and drama) and on classic Hispanic cultural symbols (such as El Cid, Don Juan, Don Quixote, and el pícaro). These literary “reenactments” were shaped in numerous ways by exile: the exotic distance of physical, cultural, and anachronistic separation that existed between the celebrity object and his public reception. This exilic distance enabled a fluid celebrity form of myriad personae that became the foundation for the subversive agency that critics have commonly associated with Byron's elusive classification. In proposing that Miranda's celebrity prefigured Byron's, this argument shows how exilic romance captured the political and cultural imagination on both sides of the Atlantic for four decades through the public fascination with Miranda's and Byron's lives and how Byron made the fascination and elusiveness of exilic romance one of the subjects of Don Juan.