Search

On his first trip to Greece from 1809 to 1811, Lord Byron became intensely preoccupied with Modern Greek language, literature, and print culture. This paper probes that interest by examining Byron's response to an 1810 Edinburgh Review article that begins as an even-handed analysis of Modern Greek literature but ends up disparaging Modern Greek writers and making the common claim that Modern Greek is a degenerated form of Ancient Greek. Although Byron's interest in Modern Greek literature and language remains a neglected aspect of the poet's work, this paper argues that his championing of Modern Greek literature gestures toward his broader support for a stronger intercultural relationship between Greece and Britain. Further, this paper contends that Byron's defense of Romaic (vernacular) Greek, which comes during a period when a Hellenic model of Greece is becoming increasingly popular throughout Europe, represents the poet's attempt to move away from solely classical conceptions of Greece and to familiarize British readers with a contemporary culture with which they were very little acquainted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article inquires into what is at stake in A.W. Schlegel's call for Romantic drama that is both 'truly historical' and 'thoroughly national'. While Schlegel suggests that historical drama should make an audience feel 'shame' at the inadequacy of the present in relation to the national past, much Romantic historical drama depicts the past as a time of revolutionary failure in which modern liberal nations might have been born but were not. Using Schiller's Wallenstein, Manzoni's The Count of Carmagnola and Byron's Marino Faliero, This article suggests that Romantic drama represents the 'shame' of the past to stage the nation as part of an ongoing historical process rather than as a fixed product. The author suggests that one of the primary ways in which Romantic drama does this is through the meta-theatrical representation of crowd scenes that depict spectators who stand in for the play's audience, and thus force actual audiences to recognize their own places within history. This paper thus reads Romantic drama's cultivation of shame not as a nostalgic desire to return to the past, but as an effort to open the present towards an always uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins as an improvisation on terms developed in Hannah Arendt's collection Men in Dark Times. Dark times for Arendt signal disastrous conditions under which life and the ideas about such a life remain invisible or obscure. Lives led under dark times are marked by a resistance to public declaration and display, and they are intelligible only in terms of privation. Dark times are thus hopeless and intransigent; while they are a state of emergency for Arendt, this paper aims to think differently about the non-pathological and transformative effects produced by disaster - that is to say, how catastrophic events in texts by De Quincey and Byron are denatured or flattened out to the point where disaster expresses new relational forms of non-destructive dark life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]