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This paper is aimed at examining Lord Byron's popularity among one of the modernist poets, W. H. Auden. For all of the comparisons that can be drawn between Lord Byron and W. H. Auden, there is little in criticism that interprets their connection in travel writing. Drawing on Don Juan and Auden's two travel books as the texts, the author of the paper finds that despite the differences in social and cultural context, both of them are endowed with literary experiments, fresh new perspectives and spiritual exploration granted by travel. Travel shapes their poetics as well as politics. Through travel and writing, they challenge the norm and tradition, and yet Auden exhibits creativity in dealing with travel in the modernist period. In surveying the intertextuality of their travel writing, the author of the paper gains a sense of both their originality and traditionary indebtedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his famous poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Lord Byron represents Albania as an exotic and Oriental place, and as a suitable 'stage' for the 'performance' of adventurous travel. In this paper, I explore the various ways in which literary tourists following 'in the footsteps of Lord Byron' in Albania reproduce and/or challenge and change 'imagined geographies' of that country. This is carried out through discourse analysis of their written accounts of their travels. The texts analysed include published travelogues, newspaper travel articles and travel blogs written by those who have travelled through southern Albania 'in the footsteps of Byron'. I argue that these tourists do not, in general, simply reproduce Byron influenced 'imagined geographies' of Albania in their travel writings but rather represent Albania as they find it, often highlighting the big differences between the Albania of Byron's day and the Albania of today. And I also argue that, while some tourists find that the encroachment of modernity into the lands described by Byron disrupts their ability to perform 'Byronic travel', others find it quite possible to maintain a 'Byronic' spirit of travel in the Albania of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 essay focuses on adaptations of Pulci’sMorgante Maggiorein early nineteenth-century England (particularly by Merivale and Frere) and Byron’s appropriation of the Pulcian strain which he found so congenial to his new poetic ‘Caravaggio’ style, especially in some of the early Cantos ofDon Juanand throughoutThe Vision of Judgment. It also discusses Byron’s concern to redress the imbalance of Southey’s sycophantic poem about George III’s apotheosis, and present the case from the Whig point of view while, at the same time, defending himself against Southey’s charge of his having committed an ‘act of treason on English poetry’. The Pulcian style, this paper argues, contributed to Byron’s crusade against the ‘moral and political cant’ of his day. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the John Murray Archive at National Library of Scotland. Particular focus is given to the works of Lord Byron in the library and the collection of manuscripts, books and travel diaries of that particular literary period. Other topics addressed include the exhibitions of Lord Byron's works at the Keats-Shelley House, annual poetry festivals and promotion of Byron's works based on the Romantic Movement.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including poetry by South African soldiers during the Great War, poet Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," and literary homes of writers including Lord Byron and John Keats.

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]

The link between Byron's overhearing Mary Chaworth's cruel words at age 15, his running away and his autobiographical account of his tragic love in 'The Dream', and the episode of Heathcliff's overhearing Cathy's words at age 15, and running away, has already been noted. This paper traces what seems to be a consistent parallel between the story narrated in 'The Dream' and the story of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Both narratives deal with a love that begins with a quasi-sibling relationship which develops into a love where the boy is unswerving in his affections, but the girl is less faithful. The boy in each case goes abroad; by the time he returns the woman is married, whereupon he enters a disastrous marriage. The woman in both narratives declines into sickness and delusion, and the man enters a paranormal world. In addition, aspects of the description of Heathcliff echo words applied to Byron's hero in 'The Dream'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of the foreign fighter (or foreign war volunteer), whether true or imagined, is clearly a potent one. This article aims to challenge some of the popular images associated with foreign volunteering. First, it examines the gap between the often romantic and idealistic descriptions of foreign volunteering and the far less romantic realities they faced. It then explores the exaggerated importance that has often been ascribed to cohorts of foreign volunteers by their contemporaries, using both historical and recent examples. Finally, the article illustrates how the image that surrounds foreign volunteers is sufficiently powerful to influence the way conflicts abroad are remembered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay begins by identifying the conversation as a hitherto neglected Romantic genre, and by distinguishing the conversation from the dialogue. It goes on to characterise the conversation as a generic hybrid, ambiguously placed between writing and speech, between the studied and the impromptu, between the ephemeral and the permanent, and between fact and fiction. It points out how closely the conversation is connected with the rise in the second decade of the nineteenth century of the literary magazine, and with the publication in the same period of Byron's Don Juan, and discusses why this should have been so. It argues that the conversation is a paradoxical literary genre in that it is best defined by its refusal of all conventional generic constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a profile of Cambridge scholar and author Peter Cochran, focusing on his edition of poem "The Vision of Judgment" written by George Gordon Byron, and his experience as a school teacher at the Hertfordshire and Essex High School, Bishop's Stortford, England. It also discusses the Peter's friendship with professor Drummond Bone and curator Catherine Payling.

Despite all the scholarly work on Lord Byron and the Shelleys’ stay in Switzerland in 1816, legends and apocryphal stories continue to proliferate, due in part to its many fictional representations but also to differences in the main protagonists’ reporting of events. While the Shelleys privileged a romanticized account faithful to what Mary Shelley would later call the ‘truth of soul’s life’, Byron lamented that ‘distorted optics’ falsified the summer’s history. Organized into a subchapter on Geneva and another on the various tours in Switzerland, this essay reviews the Genevan summer’s main sources and establishes its chronology, weighing the validity of anecdotes and evaluating how some biographers and critics have marshaled the evidence. Although Byron tried to control its narrative, the summer of 1816 became inscribed in European culture as alieu de mémoiremore romantically suggestive than mere fact, helping to explain why it still haunts us today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the acquisition of "Queen Mab" by Percy Bysshe Shelley's among the collection for Keats-Shelley House. It also focuses on an exhibition of Byron's work called 'Lord Byron in the Hand of Mary Shelley' from June 25-November 6, 2015. The article also reports an event where poetry performer Ruth Rosen presented Bright Star poems and letters for the audiences in October, 2015.

This article opens with a brief introduction to Giuseppe Mazzini, with particular reference to his commitment to republicanism, an ideal that would be fulfilled in Italy only after considerable time and with great difficulty. It then focuses on Mazzini's critical reception of Byron. Although Giuseppe Mazzini and Percy Bysshe Shelley would have allowed a more obvious comparison, it was Byron who really attracted Mazzini's attention and criticism. Mazzini uses Byron, on the one hand, as a means to demonstrate that Italians could discuss European poetry without putting at risk their national identity, or, as the classicists maintained, that fragile and fragmented profile of a nation that contemporary Italy offered to the minds and hearts of thousands of young people. On the other hand, however, Mazzini questions Byron's authority by subverting and converting his value, in a very personal way: he gradually substitutes Byron's with a different authority and credits him with new values. Mazzini could not accept Byron as the emblem of elitism and isolation: Byron's solipsism needed to be purified, and his renowned cynical attitude tempered; eventually Byron's myth needed to be connected to the destiny of peoples and nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]