8,816 research outputs found
The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (Ed. Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears)
No full textThe Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron offers the latest in critical thinking about the poet that defined the Romantic era in English Literature. The volume presents forty-five groundbreaking essays that enable readers to assess Lord Byron’s central position in Romantic traditions and his profound and far-reaching influence on British, European, and world culture. The essays in the volume are organized into five sections – ‘Works’, ‘Biographical Contexts’, ‘Literary and Cultural Contexts’, ‘Afterlives’, and ‘Reading Byron Now’ – that guide readers through the most important issues and frameworks for interpreting Byron. ‘Works’ presents original readings of Byron’s key works and many of his lesser-known ones, giving space for extensive studies of his great epic, Don Juan, and the poem that brought him fame, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. ‘Biographical Contexts’ invites readers to consider Byron’s life through key themes and patterns. ‘Literary and Cultural Contexts’ sets out the most important intellectual traditions from which Byron’s work emerged and in which it developed. ‘Afterlives’ shows readers the extent of Byron’s influence on literature, art, music, and politics in Europe and beyond. ‘Reading Byron Now’ sets out the latest critical agendas that are shaping Byron Studies today. The handbook tackles all of the big themes associated with Byron including the Byronic Hero, poetics, politics, history, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, sexuality, mobility, class, scepticism, the Gothic, celebrity culture, and Byronism. For new readers of Byron, the volume provides an excellent grounding in his life and work, and for specialists it delivers exciting new approaches to an icon of Romantic literature
[Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia] "Introduction: 'Un paese tutto poetico' - Byron in Italy, Italy in Byron"
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Byron’s ethnographic eye: the poet among the Italians
No full textIn a letter to Annabella Millbanke dated 6 September 1813, Byron wrote that “The great object of life is Sensation - to feel that we exist – [...] - it is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to gaming - to battle - to travel - to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.” Three years later, when he embarked on his second European tour – in fact a voluntary exile –, Byron felt that urge to “sense” and experience life to the full during his 8-year Italian sojourn. From 1816 to 1823, especially in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, the poet realised first-hand what in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto I) he defined as “Toil and travel”, suggesting how his idea of travelling differed from the purposes of the 18th-century Grand Tour: as proved by the letters and works that he wrote in Italy, Byron appropriated and transformed the English aristocratic habit of visiting classical and Renaissance Italy from a general formative period into a total, empirical experience based on carpe-diem philosophy and on a full sensorial immersion in the host country’s cultural customs, traditions and usages. Already in 1808 Byron wrote to his mother that “it is from experience, not from books, we ought to judge of [mankind]. There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own senses”. And this is what he achieved in Italy, where, in order to satisfy his thirst of knowledge (experiential not theoretical), he assumed an attitude towards Italian people and cultural objects which may be defined as “ethnographic”: instead of travelling and living in Italy as a flâneur observing people and places from a foreigner’s perspective, Byron, at least for most of his Italian years, wears the mask of – as well as identifies himself with – the anthropologist who can understand the Other only by plunging entirely and intensely into it, or by observing it from an insider’s perspective.
Starting from these premises, the aim of my essay is to show the idiosyncratic experiential quality of Byron’s life in Italy by looking at the ways in which his ethnographic and anthropological interests for Italian places, people and traditions emerge in his letters and works written between 1816 and 1823. In particular, the essay will focus on the following aspects: the poet’s personal relationship with and representation of Italian women and men; his absorption and usage of Italian language and the Venetian dialect; and his involvement and personal interpretation of Italian customs, traditions and behaviours (including sexuality) as opposed to English culture. The ultimate aim will be to identify and analyse textual evidence proving the author’s cosmopolitan conception of journeying abroad, which combines the capability of discarding original national habits with the tendency to embrace the new culture, merging and integrating in it instead of observing it from a distance. The essay will also show that it was thanks to his insider’s perspective that Byron could avoid idealising Italy and simplistically identifying it as the Bel Paese – an anti-Romantic stance which explains his final disenchantment with Italy and the Italians, yet at the same time allowing him to become “a portion of their hopes, and fears, and passions” (Letter to Thomas Moore, 1820) and to experience while there, as he writes in Beppo, “Love in full life, and length, not love ideal, / No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name, / But something better still, so very real”
“Don Juan in the Ottoman East: Dis/continuities in Cantos V-VIII”
No full textAs with the English cantos, those set in Constantinople and Ismail constitute a discrete narrative sequence within Don Juan, one whose apparently seamless plot progression is criss-crossed by continuities and discontinuities in relation to the poem’s previous instalments. Discontinuities particularly concern the position of these cantos in the poem’s compositional history during the fraught period of 1821-22, as well as a representation of the Ottoman East which knowingly reprises and relentlessly subverts familiar orientalist topoi. In keeping with Don Juan’s pervasive medley mode, cantos V-VIII are built on an interplay of dis/continuities forcing readers uninterruptedly to identify and decode multiple, ever-varying lines of argument about excess, consumption, eroticism and war, and held together by a central thread of reflections on power. Investigating the thematic and structural peculiarities of this section of Don Juan, this chapter suggests that we read it as a unit within the poem, which consistently engages questions of authority and control through a distinctive interweaving of figurative protocols, historical-ideological materials, and metaliterary references
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