Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Research Articles

Modernizing Classical Poetics and Cultural Traditions: Wu Mi's Enterprise of Rewriting George Gordon Byron

Modernizing Classical Poetics and Cultural Traditions: Wu Mi's Enterprise of Rewriting George Gordon Byron

Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi

Reviewed by: Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History ed. by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi Norman Vance (bio) Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi; pp. xxvii + 285. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2020, $82.50, $27.50 paper. Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History is exciting and scholarly. This edited collection by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi shows how the Victorians could travel in imagination through time and space, above and beneath the earth and under the sea. They could draw on the work not just of historians but of geologists, geographers, oceanographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, and more-or-less well-informed fantasists such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The twelve chapters travel widely across different disciplines, using ideas of time to illuminate many facets of the Victorian knowledge explosion, from the age of the earth to the ambivalences of the new machine age, from Anglo-Saxon poetry and biblical scholarship to submarines and deep-sea cables. Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1876) is used in Clare Pettitt's chapter "At Sea," and Wellsian fantasy is briefly mentioned by Daniel Wilson in the concluding chapter on "How We Got Here," but Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and the time traveler who uses it are oddly absent. So is Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), which was inspired by geology and paleontology, which brought prehistoric creatures back to life and paved the way for later dinosaur fantasies such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) and Steven Spielberg's film Jurassic Park (1993). Despite some helpful cross-referencing, the sheer range and diversity of encounters with time and history described in the book present problems of coherence. Rachel Bryant Davies's "Through the Proscenium Arch," an entertaining chapter on children's toy-theater focused on a cheerfully jumbled version of "The Siege of Troy" (a popular 1833 equestrian re-enactment), is interesting in itself, but it is a long way from the seemingly grown-up science and apparent high seriousness of other chapters. At first sight the four sections labelled "Narratives," "Origins," "Time in Transit," and "Unfinished Business" do not seem to have very much to do with each other. But Romanticism, particularly the Romantic quest and the Romantic cult of mystery and gothic strangeness, provides an understated continuity or common thread, even if the quests of scholars, scientists, and spiritualists were often inconclusive and the dawning awareness of complex antecedents and of unimaginable antiquity disconcertingly eroded earlier certainties. As Michael Ledger-Lomas observes in his chapter "On Pilgrimage," "the venerable urge to be a pilgrim shaped how Victorians thought about the passage of time and the scholarly investigation of time" (157). This extended to geological time. Well-travelled Lord Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) read about geology and made imaginative use of it, as Clare Pettitt observes. The influential geologist Charles Lyell, a contemporary of the younger Romantics, read his Byron, while Victorians such as the Tennyson of In Memoriam (1850) read their Lyell and found no comfort in the abysses of geological time that he disclosed. Simon Goldhill makes a valiant attempt to hold things together in an ambitious chapter on the quest for origins, "Ad Fontes." His title invokes Erasmus and, behind him, the Latin Bible. Goldhill contrasts humanist delight in Greek culture as the source or fountainhead of all knowledge with the sadder and wiser Victorian acceptance of the [End Page 585] elusiveness of their quest for ultimate sources and the destabilizing nature of the enterprise. A classical scholar himself, he draws on the history of textual scholarship, both classical and biblical, to illustrate the point. Special textual authority attaches to the original manuscript, but the original manuscripts of ancient texts have not survived. One of the great discoveries in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship was Codex Sinaiticus, now in the British Library, a fourth-century manuscript containing the earliest surviving text of the entire New Testament. Its scholarly primacy is indicated by identifying it as "aleph," the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, though the manuscript was a...

OYO: The Beautiful River by Mark B. Hamilton (review)

Reviewed by: OYO: The Beautiful River by Mark B. Hamilton Jeffery Moser Mark B. Hamilton. OYO: The Beautiful River. Brunswick, ME: Shanti Arts, 2020. 75 p. First presented as a chapbook and a finalist for the Washington Prize in 2015, Mark Hamilton's environmental narrative, OYO: The Beautiful River was recently issued in October 2020 by Shanti Arts. "OYO" and "O-Yo" are variant English names for the Ohio River and have their origins from the Iroquois "O-Y-O," meaning "the great river." When seventeenth-century French fur trader and explorer La Salle came upon the river in 1669, he called it la belle rivière or "the beautiful river." Hamilton's narrative traverses the Ohio's beauty, natural scenic wonders, and its cultural and commercial impact to the nation. The anthology is based on his own solo personal experience navigating the River in a rowboat from its geographical beginning at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers near Pittsburgh, then its northwesterly flow out of Pennsylvania, before heading southwesterly toward the Mississippi River. Its 981-mile course eventually ends at Cairo, Illinois. Congruously, the Ohio's course is steeped in American history and literary lore, for the river first formed the southern border of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, American's first territorial expansion beyond its original thirteen colonies, and later, as the southern border for the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Cairo is the only choice that Twain's two endearing main characters Huck Finn and Jim have in traveling south in order to get to a free state and allow Jim to seek further passage on a steamboat up the Ohio River to the North and freedom. Hamilton's anthology capitalizes on this geographic and literary legacy. As an initial defense of his poetry and the rationale for his singular journey, Hamilton launches his collection with a borrowed translation from Rainer Maria Rilke's Ninth Elegy: "Oh, not because happiness exists. … But because truly here is so much' because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some small way keeps calling to Us, the most fleeting of all." This informal [End Page 228] foreword is inspiring because it puts the reader on par with the poet as a special invitation to join in this rare navigational feat. What follows are over fifty poems, some short and some long, that relate the poet's experience with a River that is "strange" (9), "folds and contorts, pulls down and boils up" (11), and makes the rower "buck and shudder in the chilling spray / exhilarated by a rogue wave whooshing beneath / with its warning: 'Stay relaxed. Stay in rhythm / with the weather" (13). Readers become emotionally attached to the poet and the sights, sounds, and drama of his adventure, divided into two sections called "Spring" and "Summer," and no less engaging than Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It is as informative and reflective about nature and humans' duty to the environment as any number of books by American naturalist and survivalist Tom Brown, Jr. In his little dory, named Pelican, Hamilton glides between "pillars of crafted stone" (13) and "hidden voice" (15), encountering cities, factories, locks, dams, buoys, sandbars, islands, river towns, beaches, creeks, wooded banks, barges, first-timers and old-timers fishing, swimmers, tourists, trash, tangled branches, hundreds of other natural and unnatural objects, fish, insects, birds, wildlife, diverse weather, conflicts, dangers, pleasantries, and even a floating corpse. "It's too incredible to be real. But the legs, the bulbous heel, / the creases of skin at the arch, my eyes widening into a body / with arms outstretched, feet tapping sadly in the driftwood. / I should report it" (51). Hamilton's poetry moves like the poet-oarsman himself, at times reflective when he is "moving on reflections to an early morning breeze" that makes him feel "good to sweat and row" (53), and another day when he departs and river experts advise "Stay safe" (32). Readers cannot help but be moved and cling to the poet and his words, hoping that he protects himself and his silent passenger, the reader: "Downriver, the up-city of Cincinnati collides into wakes, / builds up and...

FREEDOM OF INDIVIDUALITY AND COUNTRY’S INDEPENDENCE IN BYRON AND CHULPON'S WORKS

The article deals with the analysis of English poet Byron and Uzbek author Chulpon’s works and the theme of freedom described in them. The terms “freedom of individuality and “country’s independence” have been analyzed in both poets' works thoroughly. Romanticism is associated with the prominent figure of English literature – George Gordon Noel Lord Byron. Byron’s early political activities were more the result of propinquity and propriety than of any deep-felt enthusiasms. As Byron’s interest in political liberty refers both to personal and in abstract aspects, so his interest in social liberty concerns both individual and general relationships. So the works as “Song for the Luddites”, “Thou art not false, but thou art fickle” and some Cantoe’s of the poem “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” have been analyzed in the article showing the individual freedom and country’s independence in them.

PROFILES OF ALBANIANHOOD IN THE FOCUS OF BRITISH ROMANTIC LENSES

Due to various political, social and economic reasons, unfortunately, Albanian culture, literature and history at large, have long been traced and written by foreigners rather than Albanians. Although often labeled as a "mute" people who cannot express themselves because of the disappearance of historical sources, for the sake of truth, there has always been a considerable collective memory among Albanian people which has quite frequently been used by prominent writers and albanologists. The prototype of the romantic poet, Lord Byron, and British albanologist, Edith Durham, are probably the two main credentials in their efforts to serve as spokespersons of the Albanian life in the early nineteenth and early twentieth century in the eyes of the civilized world. The purpose of this paper is to present profiles of Albanianhood as recorded in the British romantic diary of Durham’s “The burden of the Balkans” held during her first lengthy expedition, on horseback and on foot, through the wilds of southern and central Albania and the long poem by Lord Byron “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage”- Canto II. What brings these two names together despite the century-long span of their literary creativity seems to be the fact that their life ideology was led by the cult of individual freedom and at the same time by the romantic conviction that it is not acceptable, not even in the nature of things that the world remain immobile. The perception of the Albanian world according to these two perspectives has many converging points that do nothing but reinforce the truthfulness of both accounts although made in two very different genres of literary writing. The featuring of these compliances as well as graphic and photographical illustrations of the issues referred to remain within the scope of the present paper.

Male Postpartum Preface: Cervantes and Lord Byron’s Prefaces to Don Quixote and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

The purpose of this paper is to attend to the preface as an important element in understanding the symbiotic relationship between author and text, especially when a male author assumes the female power of procreation. In the prefaces to Don Quixote Part I and II and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cervantes and Lord Byron, respectively, identify their main heroes as their 'child of the imagination/brain '. Nevertheless, in many instances we encounter moments of anxiety manifested in a dialectic of engagement and disengagement, owning and disowning, of denying and defending theirfictional personages. To Cervantes, Don Quixote is "child of his brain", the son, and yet hes also the stepson, who eventually ends up no more than a brave knight; to Byron, as well, Childe Harold was initially called Childe Burun, but later on is referred to as just a "fictitious character" from whom Byron tried to disengage throughout the poem. This equivocal and dialectical discourse ofembracement and abandonment could be better understood by extending the birthing metaphor to encompass postpartum anxiety. In the prefaces, both Cervantes and Byron Platonic male spiritual pregnancy is combined with the female physical and psychological symptoms of giving birth and its qftermath. Thus, the preface becomes a birth certificate not only legitimizing the hero, but also problematizing the parental relationship between father/author and son/text or hem, for it involves more than the ontological history Of the hem or the text.

‘Who shall now lead?’ The Politics of Paratexts in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I–II

Until Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18), Byron was on the edge of fame. He broke this barrier through his European Tour (1809–11) which provided inspiration for the famous poem. Whilst extending social boundaries, through his meeting with Ali Pasha, Byron expanded the itinerary of the traditional ‘Grand Tour’ to include land, like Albania, previously unmarked by British boots. Byron mirrors his pioneering travel practices in his fiction. On the edges of Childe Harold are footnotes that cover anthropological, topographical, and autobiographical ground, advancing cultural understanding of areas either neglected or misrepresented by previous writers. I argue that, through revisions of these footnotes, Byron sought to dispel and correct myths relating to obscure European nations, perpetuated by ‘irresponsible’ accounts of previous travellers and in doing so strove to educate his readership on the benefits of informed, reasoned debates, built on empirical knowledge. This article establishes a link between Byron's poetry and politics to assess how far his demand for objectivity in literature bled into his political ambitions.

Scritture in filigrana. Note a margine della prima traduzione italiana di Mary Edith Durham, High Albania, Londra, 1909 (Nella Terra del Passato Vivente. La scoperta dell'Albania nell'Europa del primo Novecento, Lecce, 2016)

In the spring of 1908, the English artist and writer Edith Durham left Scutari on the way to High Albania, to visit lands barely explored by foreign travellers. Whereas a century before Lord Byron had celebrated Southern Albania, to which he dedicated several magnificent lines of his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Northern regions remained shrouded in mystery: as Thomas Carlyle would put it, they were the lands of the unspeakable Turk, the frontier between Islam and Christianity. Her journey into the unknown led Durham to learn about customs and traditions whose origins were lost in the mists of myth, a small universe close to the coasts of the eastern Adriatic, prodigiously remaining at the margins of time and history. The results of Durham's research were published in High Albania (1909), one of the most famous travel books about the tiny Balkan country. This paper deals with some features emerging from the first Italian translation of the Durham travelogue, in particular with the literary references which provided Durham with the methodological and conceptual coordinates that frame her insight into Albania.

‘The Fever of Vain Longing’: Emotions of War in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III

This essay deals with Byron's visit to the field of Waterloo as described in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III. I will suggest that the Canto sees the transformation of the Byronic hero into the man of feeling. Byron re-configures this eighteenth-century character type in a way that his personal grief becomes inseparable from collective feeling and national concerns. The deployment of the man of feeling becomes for Byron a political statement: an aid for the articulation of his disappointment in post-Waterloo European politics and a longing for lost Revolutionary ideals. Through the analysis of the Canto's main organising tropes I will be arguing that Byron's ambivalent perspective on the outcome of Waterloo is the reason for the restless oscillation of conflicting forces in the poem. The essay will re-read Stanza 33's broken mirror simile in the context of eighteenth-century notions of sensibility and sympathy.

Byron, Barrett Browning and the Organization of Light

Feminist readings of Casa Guidi Windows frequently invoke Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as a significant intertext for Barrett Browning, identifying in Barrett's Italy a direct retort to Byron's representation of the Italian nation as a languishing female body, which returns to it the potential agency inherent in the republican body politic. But Barrett's Italy not only challenges Byron's account of Italy as the feminine victim of masculine history, it also negotiates the obliterating glare of Byronic light. Responding to recent interpretations of the poem's windows as apertures that compromise the division between public masculine and private feminine space, this article explores the ways Casa Guidi, both the poem and the home that it describes, represent a liberal architectonics that is as concerned with resisting as it is with celebrating the subliming forces of indifferent nature and international politics. One of the ways in which that resistance is performed is via the poet's negotiation of Italian light, natural, divine and artistic, a negotiation through which Barrett describes a post-Romantic feminine poetics that realigns poetic form and the domestic, and suggests both as spaces through which light may break.

Anti-hero Worship: The Emergence of the “Byronic hero” Archetype in the Nineteenth Century

Anti-hero Worship:The Emergence of the "Byronic hero" Archetype in the Nineteenth Century Cora Palfy (bio) Introduction The works of poet Lord Byron were a tour de force over the course of the nineteenth century—from the serial release of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818), ever-famous poetry like Don Juan (1819), and his dramatic stage works, such as Manfred (1817), Byron can be noted as one of the most highly influential authors and artists of his time.1 Though Byronic style and traits were adopted by a variety of authors and poets throughout Europe, Byron's influence stretched beyond the literary. Berlioz, Brahms, Schumann, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, and other nineteenth-century composers also adopted Byronic plots or narrative elements and incorporated them into musical works.2 Aside from the polemical writing style and sensational authorial persona that mark his work as distinct, Byron also introduced a unique character type, the "Byronic hero." This novel hero manipulated standard behaviors and plot outcomes associated with earlier conceptions [End Page 161] of the "hero" archetype, creating an entirely new standard character that revolutionized literature and art.3 The archetypical twists necessary to produce a Byronic hero provide a prime opportunity to investigate Byron's influence on musical composition during the mid-nineteenth century. If the Byronic hero was initially a manipulation of standard narrative expectations and character types, how did composers adapt stock patterns and manipulate listener expectations in order to communicate a musical Byronic hero? This paper provides three case studies that demonstrate recurrent patterns of topical troping in Byronic music. My analyses reveal that pieces, such as Schumann's Manfred Overture, Op. 115, Tchaikovsky's "Manfred" Symphony, Op. 58, I, and Berlioz's Harold en Italie, Op. 16, I all contain military and ombra topics, formal deformations, and obsessively reiterated thematic gestures. The coalescence of these elements communicates the impression of the lovelorn, obsessive, and static Byronic hero. The presence of these features calls into question the representation and variety of musical heroes in the nineteenth century and the way in which topics can be manipulated to convey nuanced, specific character types. Heroism and its Adaptations in Music and Literature The "hero" archetype has been present in literature since the earliest mythologies. Psychoanalyst and ethnographer Joseph Campbell has noted that hero mythology is a cultural universal and that heroic journeys have been a part of these mythologies as symbolic representations of human psychological and biological development.4 Campbell's heroic "monomyth" articulates a common framework underlying the hero's journey—the hero undergoes a cycle of separation, initiation, and return.5 Separation entails both the introduction of a hero and his departure from home, initiation includes the hero's trials and tribulations, and finally, the hero victoriously returns with transcendent, enlightened knowledge.6 Campbell defines the hero thus, "The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and [End Page 162] local historical limitations to the generally valid, normal human forms."7 Campbell's ideas of an individuated hero symbolically vanquishing the troubles of his era correspond well with the prominent traits of the many varieties of hero available in contemporary literature and film. Campbell's definition of hero in the universal monomyth, however, leaves much room for refinement and growth in these various genres. The diverse varieties of hero extant today stem from an explosion in and evolution of heroic literary types in the eighteenth century. Peter Thorslev's study on the Byronic hero surveys pre-Romantic and early Romantic distinctions between distinct hero types, each of which feeds into Byron's later archetype.8 Thorslev details three eighteenth-century hero types, the "Child of Nature, the Hero of Sensibility, and the Gothic Villain" and four Romantic hero types, the "Noble Outlaw… the Faust-figure, Cain and the Wandering Jew, and Satan-Prometheus."9 Each of these character types shares certain features, such as an understanding of a higher moral,10 noble spirit or elevated social role, and the role of accomplishing action or resolving conflicts throughout a plot. These peremptory heroic types laid the groundwork for the later Byronic hero. This hero, which today might...

Tragic Consolation in “Ode to a Nightingale”

'Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3 THE CONFIDENCE OF JOHN KEATS's WRITING IN 1819 WAS ACCOMPANIED by continuing uncertainty about the moral office of poetry. Most of the more ambitious texts of Keats's great year interrogate their own imaginative logic in some way and many of them, Keats critics can attest, expressly seek to understand how poet can in fact qualify as a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men. (1) It should occasion no surprise, consequently, that in to Nightingale, the nightingale's beautiful song both ravishes the poet's senses and fills him with disquietude. It is disquietude which soon affiliates itself with the tragic catalogue of the poem's third stanza. Doubts of the real worth of poetry were crowding in upon Keats as he wrote those opening lines, David Bromwich speculates; for at worst is done out of vanity may be judged by posterity to have been done in vain. Is not every poet an egoist, compared to every nurse? How is Tom's death to be weighed in the balance with the composition of an ode? (2) These questions, I agree, were deeply implicated in the occasion of Keats's Ode. The project of is both to commemorate lapsing happiness and to ask, what then? What solace can Keats's poem or any poem offer to the victims of world Where but to think is to be full of sorrow (27)? In addressing such questions, the procedure of to Nightingale becomes historicist in James Chandler's sense of the term: as historicist exercise, the Ode is unavoidably concerned with its cultural modernity, and concerned to investigate that modernity by placing it in dialogic interplay with past texts and discourses. (3) That imperative explains in fact the typically Keatsian literariness of Nightingale: as elsewhere in Keats the poem's intertextual linkages serve as historical references to previous poems and their defining values, among which the poet must then find his own way. Here, though, Keats's historicist intertextuality works in tandem with his Ode's dramatic rhetoric. is still frequently regarded as sublime or visionary poem which charts the poet's progressive rejection of transcendent flight. In my view, the Ode overrules transcendence right from the start: Keats assumes the inadequacy of idealizing dream rather than making it his poem's lesson and story, and so sets himself to tell different kind of story. The earthbound meditation of takes the form of dramatic soliloquy detached from its theatrical context; and indeed the poem reflects both Keats's appreciation of Edmund Kean's innovative acting and William Hazlitt's dramatic criticism, especially his Characters of Shakespear's Plays. These are the chief influences on the defense of modern poetry's consolatory office that finally hazards. By its analysis of the psychology of idealism, the Ode dismisses the traditional consolations of western philosophical and religious tradition: they cannot provide modern poetry with effective consolatory resources, and their various defenders, Wordsworth in particular, must be firmly resisted. The secular alternative that dramatizes Keats takes from his understanding of tragic representation. 1. to Nightingale has been often declared one of the most densely echoic of Keats's lyric poems. (4) The Ode reveals creative mind well-stored with its reading and habituated to incorporating that reading into even its most personal, emotionally urgent efforts of self-expression. Yet the imagination which announces itself in the poem's bold opening lines is from the beginning functioning in an intellectually associative fashion and recalling some texts rather than others because of their pertinence to the poem's thematic concerns. …

‘Byron and the Mediterranean’ 10th International Student Byron Conference Messolonghi, 22–27 May 2015

The Tenth International Student Byron Conference, held from 22-27 May 2015 in Messolonghi, Greece, appropriately acknowledged tenth anniversary of such an ambitious and successful conference by choosing broad theme 'Byron and Mediterranean'. As in past, conference-which as always was flawlessly organised and managed by President of Messolonghi Byron Society. Mrs. Rosa Florou- drew participants from around world for nearly a week of insightful scholarship regarding Byron's life and works, travel spanning region, and intellectual companionship. This year's participants were undergraduate and graduate students, professors and local enthusiasts. They traveled from such places as United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Taiwan, Lebanon, and Greece.Because conference officially began with registration at four o'clock on 22 May, that first Friday was an opportunity for many participants to explore parts of Athens (where most travellers first arrived from their home countries), beautiful coastline and mountains that separate Athens and Messolonghi and that include such famous sites as Corinth Canal, or charming town of Messolonghi itself. Once everyone arrived and checked in at Theoxenia Hotel, participants boarded a coach for Byron House containing administrative office of Messolonghi Byron Society and library of Byron Research Center. There they were greeted by delicious homemade desserts and coffee and had an opportunity to mingle before being welcomed by conference directors Mrs. Rosa Florou, Professor Peter Graham, Director of International Relations for Messolonghi Byron center, and Joint President of International Association of Byron Societies, Professor Naji Oueijan. After refreshments, group was treated to a tour of a variety of significant sites in Messolonghi, including Cathedral of Agios Spyridon, which Byron visited during his time living in 'sacred city', and Gallery of Christos and Sophia Moschandreou to see an exhibition of modern paintings relating to Byron and to local area. Both were beautiful experiences that built nicely towards final sightseeing opportunity at Municipal Museum of History and Art Municipal Gallery, which provided useful historical background information of area. After perusing art in Municipal Gallery, participants were welcomed by Mayor of Messolonghi, Mr. Nikos Karapanos, who gave a warm and passionate speech in Greek, translated into English by several lively impromptu translators. The evening concluded with a welcoming dinner at nearby Archontiko restaurant, followed by (for many of those jet lagged) an early bedtime or else (for those more rested) a night of dancing and socialising in heart of Messolonghi.The academic portion of conference began on Saturday 23 May, at Regional building. There, Rosa Florou, Peter Graham, Jonathan Gross, Naji Oueijan, and Peter Myrian greeted participants but also, more significantly, reflected on life and scholarship of recently deceased English Byron scholar Peter Cochran. Following a moment of silence, first session, chaired by Peter Myrian, began. The first paper, given by Stephen Minta (York), revisited Stephen Cheeke's Byron and Place: History, Translation, and Nostalgia and paid particular attention to Byron's complicated relationship with Greece of past and of his present day using Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as a foundation for his argument. Perhaps even more interestingly, Minta addressed questions regarding 'authenticity of traveller's engagement with what Byron calls the truth of history [...] and of place.' Elli Karampela (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) gave next paper, which made use of Benedict Anderson's theoretical framework 'imagined communities' to examine Byron's own complex relationship with place of England versus place of Greece. …

‘I like the Habeas Corpus (when we've got it)’: Byron,Wellington and the future of British Liberties

This article examines Byron's hostile treatment of the Duke of Wellington, and of the role he played in restoring eighteenth century structures and systems in nineteenth century Europe, and in preserving these structures and systems in England. There is a preliminary discussion of the accounts Byron provides of two battles in which Wellington took part, Talavera and Waterloo, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Thereafter, the main focus is on Don Juan and, in particular, on the ‘English Cantos’, and on the interplay between the time of Juan's supposed visit to England (pre-1794) and the events of post-1794 European history. In particular, the emphasis will be on Byron's treatment of the conventional and often – in his view – misplaced pride expressed by the English in their institutions and practices. English strictures on Napoleon's imperial ambitions are set against the fact that England was, at this time, steadily amassing its own empire. By way of a context for aspects of Byron's thinking about England, a brief account is offered of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, and its aftermath.

‘Collecting Byron: A Conference in Celebration of the Byron Society Collection’ Drew University, Madison, New Jersey 11-13 April 2014

The mandate of the 'Collecting Byron' conference was double: to assemble Byron scholar-collectors and to celebrate the Byron Society of America's collection of Byroniana, books and ephemera now housed at the Drew University Library. In her accomplished introduction to the conference pamphlet, Marsha Manns, Co-Founder and Chair of the Byron Society of America, gives the history of the Byron collection at Drew and anecdotes regarding several of the donors, including Jackie Palmer and Michael Rees, now Brother Teilo. The conference was also the occasion of the ninth Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lecture, given by Alice Levine (Hofstra). Twenty-two Byron scholars attended the conference, including the redoubtable Jack Gumpert Wasserman, who described his Byron Collection and his international adventures as a collector, as well as David McClay, Senior Curator of the John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, who offered many valuable insights into the history of this, the most important collection of Byron documents and MSS.Alice Levine's lecture suited the conference and invoked the legacy of Leslie A. Marchand most admirably. Since the publication of her critical edition of Byron's Poetry and Prose (Norton, 2010), Professor Levine has had to answer many times the question, 'Why didn't you include [insert your missing favourite here]?' Levine's lecture was a thoughtful answer to this question which she supplemented with a spreadsheet outlining which 'favourites' did make it into eight of the most recognised editions beginning with Swinburne's Moxon edition (1866) and including Auden's (NAL, 1966), McGann's (OUP, 2000) and her own. To the surprise of many in the audience, the most anthologised poem by Byron is not 'She Walks in Beauty' but rather 'On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year'. Levine gave many insights into the 'saga' of selecting the poems for her edition, a process which consumed two years of the nine-year project; and the second-guessing of her selections continues to haunt her. She admires Auden's edition because of his relish for Byron's satire and because he includes many of the letters. Following Auden's example, Levine reprinted 82 letters and several journal entries, many of which include shorter poems. An anecdote that Levine recounted is especially telling. She recalled seeing a framed version of Byron's 'Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull' in a friend's apartment. The fact that she and her friend shared an affection for the poem, albeit unknowingly, brought a fresh appreciation for the lines. One can't help but wonder how strongly and thoroughly the sharing of Byron's work informs this fine edition. The hardest choice of all was cutting Don Juan because digression is all; and without the narrative context for a 'hinge', the artifice of Byron's digressive art loses its copiousness and power.I was most struck by the strong representation of young Byron scholars from the USA and Canada. In his paper 'Let us look at them as they are: Lord Byron and Modern Greek Print Culture', Alexander Grammatikos (Carleton) gave a splendid analysis of Byron's changing attitudes to the Greece of the first Mediterranean Tour as exemplified in the notes appended to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. Grammatikos is uniquely qualified to shed light on Byron's understanding of the Romaic language and print culture that Byron discovered at the end of 1809. He made the point that Byron wanted to look at the contemporary Greek writers 'as they are ' rather than as automatically subordinated to Classical Greek culture. Isaac Cowell (Rutgers) in his 'Byron as Collector of Failures and Improbabilities: Don Juan and the Problem of Hope', focused on Byron's use of'oppositional irony' whereby an apparent moment of frustration or 'deadweight' can produce a flicker of hope. Cowell used Don Juan, VIII, 96 and the dynamism of the shared 'dilated glance' between Juan and Leila to make his point. Byron often confronts the reader with an apparent paradox and then dares the reader to consider it. …

Childe Harold's Journey to the East and “Authenticity”

This essay deals with the notion of orientalist discourse in Lord Byron‟s Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Concentrating on the dialectical attitudes towards the „Orient‟ in Byron‟s poem the writers try to show, through a contrapuntal textual analysis, how signs emerge of a somewhat stereotypical and often monolithic Orient. It is argued that the work‟s claim on the authenticity of the representations of the East is a subtle textual strategy. This seems to be true despite the existence of seemingly more favourable views towards „Orientals‟, especially in the footnotes, compared to Turkish Tales. Central to the study is the idea that similar discursive practices also seem to influence most of Byron‟s critics, which include contemporary scholars who have conducted numerous forms of textual analysis through differing theoretical approaches.

‘Without a Sigh He Left’: Byron's Poetry of Departure in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , Cantos I and II

This essay explores Byron’s poetry of departure in the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage . It examines these cantos’ treatment of history and genre, their use of rhyme and phrasal repetition, their negotiation of the relationship between narrator and character, and their themes of elegy and endurance. It argues that much which is dramatic and affecting in the opening cantos derives from an exilic rhetoric that is self-subverting and self-correcting.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage : Annotating the Second Canto

Most readers of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage concentrate on the poem but the full effect of Byron's popular work is also based on notes and other ‘extraneous’ materials. In particular, the second canto and Byron's views on the contemporary Greece which he discovered on his travels and which sometimes challenged received assumptions depends not only on its poetic core but also on a complement of extra poems, a range of annotation including a number of substantial essays, angry responses to Elgin and Lusieri and appraising accounts of Turks and Albanians, a detailed appendix on Romaic (or vernacular modern Greek), and a facsimile of a letter to Byron in Romaic. The philhellenism which is rightly attributed to Byron and to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is the product both of a poem which is predominantly nostalgic and looks yearningly to a heroic past and also of notes and prose essays demonstrating a passionate identification with victimised Greek contemporaries, who are associated with other ‘enslaved’ or ‘fall...

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Cantos I and II in 1812

This essay asks and tries to answer the following question: why were the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage such a sensational and immediate success in 1812? There were many not dissimilar poems on the battles of the Peninsular War and the past glories of Greece but Byron's poem must have both brought into view strong, but partly hidden, resonances within his public and shown them something new. The concluding part of the essay tries to show the link between this ‘newness’ and the whole subsequent development of Byron as a poet.

‘Byron and 1812’ London Byron Society Symposium, Kingsway Hall Hotel 10-14 September 2012

The first day of the London Byron Society's Symposium on the theme of 'Byron and 1812' coincided with a victory parade for the UK's Olympic athletes. Celebration was in the air (as well as several red arrows) as delegates made their way through worse than usual traffic congestion in the capital towards the conference venue. Delegates met to register and enjoy a welcome reception in the Kingsway Hall Hotel in Covent Garden prior to setting offfor John Murray's at 50 Albemarle Street.The conference theme was broadly intended to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Childe Harold was the first of Byron's works to be published by John Murray. The publisher's descendant, John Murray VI, once said he often had 'the fanciful thought that on the morning that Byron woke up to find himself famous, Murray woke to find himself a gentleman'. The sentiment neatly articulates the mutual benefit the poem brought to poet and publisher - 2012 also marks the bicentenary of Murray's acquisition of Albemarle Street, a location he described as 'peculiarly favourable for the dissemination of any work of eminence among the fashionable & literary part of the Metropolis'. I have worked on Byron and Murray for many years but had never visited Albemarle Street and I cannot describe my excitement as I approached the famous premises. We enjoyed wonderful hospitality from John and Virginia Murray, and a particularly informative talk from Virginia Murray, and were encouraged to wander about, inspecting some treasures which were on display. Amongst several (some disturbingly long) locks of hair were Byron's boots, a beautiful miniature of Caroline Lamb, the manuscript of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, and intriguingly, the notebook from which the memoirs were torn and burned in the upstairs drawing room.The following morning saw the academic programme begin with two superb close readings of Childe Harold I and II from Bernard Beatty (Liverpool and St Andrews) and Michael O'Neill (Durham). Beatty's paper revisited a question that critics have been asking for 200 years and will probably be asking for 200 more - what was it about Childe Harold which led it to take (in his words) 'sudden and entire possession of English minds in 1812?' His answer was to stress the combination of violence, lyrical elegance, and impetuosity in the opening cantos and to offer a fascinating reading of 'the Harold problem'. O'Neill illuminated what he called Byron's 'poetry of departure' in a forensic analysis of the poem, demonstrating the manner by which Byron's poetry often welcomes 'accidental contingency'. Both papers focused on the force and drive of Childe Harold which propels the poem forward - as Beatty reminded us, 'no one does rushing better than Byron'.After lunch, the panel focused on female authors and Byronic heroines. Anna Camillieri (Oxford) began by reminding us of the contrast between Byron's often passive heroes and his lively heroines. With special emphasis on Don Juan, Camillieri argued that it is in the civilised world of conversation that these heroines excel. Caroline Franklin (Swansea) spoke eloquently about Caroline Lamb and Glenarvon, stressing that the novel is a critique of the Byronic hero and exploring its influence on Victorian feminist writing and particularly on 'silver-fork' novels. The concluding paper saw Peter Graham (Virginia Tech) contrast what he called the light and dark side of the spirit of the age, Childe Harold and Pride and Prejudice. 2013 sees the bicentenary of the publication of Jane Austen's novel, and it was fascinating to hear Graham explore it with reference to Byron.The second evening saw delegates enjoy a visit to Melbourne House. I regretted not being able to attend at the time, and regret it even more so after hearing a report of events from Bernard Beatty. He described the walk there on a beautiful summer's evening, through Covent Garden, past Drury Lane Theatre, and the site of Dickens's infamous blacking factory, along the embankment to Melbourne House as 'one of the nicest unexpected events' in recent Byron gatherings. …