Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror

Transcription

1 Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror

2 Also by Matthew J. A. Green VISIONARY MATERIALISM IN THE EARLY WORKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE Also by Piya Pal-Lapinski THE EXOTIC WOMAN IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH FICTION AND CULTURE: A Reconsideration

3 Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror Edited by Matthew J. A. Green Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Nottingham, UK and Piya Pal-Lapinski Associate Professor of English, Bowling Green State University, USA Palgrave macmillan

4 Selection and editorial matter Matthew J. A. Green & Piya Pal-Lapinski 2011 Individual chapters contributors 2011 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN DOI / ISBN ( ebook ) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

5 For Abigail and Louise Matthew For Jonathan Piya

6 Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Contributors ix x xi Introduction: Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror 1 Matthew J. A. Green and Piya Pal-Lapinski 1 That lifeless thing the living fear : Freedom, Community, and the Gothic Body in The Giaour 15 Matthew J. A. Green 2 Sardanapalus, Spectacle, and the Empire State 33 Andrew M. Stauffer 3 Byron s Venetian Masque of the French Revolution: Sovereignty, Terror, and the Geopolitics of Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari 47 Joshua David Gonsalves 4 Awake to Terror : The Impact of Italy on Byron s Depiction of Freedom s Battles 64 Jane Stabler 5 Something Not Yet Made Good : Byron s Cain, Godwin, and Mary Shelley s Falkner 84 Tilottama Rajan 6 Manfred s New Promethean Agon 102 Young-ok An 7 Like the Sheeted Fire from Heaven : Transcendence and Resentment in Marino Faliero 118 Ian Dennis 8 And Freedom s fame finds wings on every wind : Byron, Switzerland, and the Poetics of Freedom 136 Simon Bainbridge vii

7 viii Contents 9 Byron: Consistency, Change, and the Greek War 152 Stephen Minta 10 I have a penchant for black : Race and Orphic Dismemberment in Byron s The Deformed Transformed and J. M. Coetzee s Disgrace 167 Jonathan Gross 11 Byronic Terror and Impossible Exchange: From Werner to Baudrillard s The Spirit of Terrorism 182 Piya Pal-Lapinski Notes 196 Index 228

8 List of Figures 2.1 Scene from Sardanapalus Booth s Theater. (September, 1876?). Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University Mrs. Agnes Booth, as Myrrha, in Sardanapalus. The Illustrated Sporting New Yorker (October 7, 1876), Centennial Exhibit, Philadelphia, 1876 [Colossal hand and torch, Bartholdi s Statue of Liberty]. Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views. New York Public Library Photography Collection, Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs (Wikimedia Commons image) Program, Booth s Theater. September 30, (Author s collection) Agnes Booth and Frank C. Bangs, Cabinet card publicity photographs, Cabinet Photographs (Booth, Agnes, and Bangs, Frank C.), Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University 42 ix

9 Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the contributors for their excellent and thoughtful work throughout various phases of this project, as well as each other. We are very grateful for the support and encouragement of colleagues in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham and the Department of English at Bowling Green State University. Thanks are due to Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle, for their advice and guidance during the editing stage, as well as to the anonymous reader for the detailed and encouraging feedback. We would also like to thank the Art Institute of Chicago, for permission to reproduce Eugène Delacroix, The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, 1826 and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to reproduce Scene from Sardanapalus Booth s Theater and Agnes Booth and Frank C. Bangs, Cabinet Photographs (Booth, Agnes, and Bangs, Frank C.). Additionally, we would like to thank Jonathan Gross and Louise Mullany for their ongoing and invaluable support and advice over the course of this project. x

10 Contributors Young-ok An is Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, where she teaches various courses in British Romantic writers, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, women s literature, theory and literary criticism. Among her publications are studies of Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in Criticism and Studies in Romanticism. Her book-length project, Prometheus Unmanned: Becoming Promethea, investigates Romantic revisions of Prometheanism in Blake, Byron, the Shelleys, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon, especially focusing on their regendering of the Promethean hero. She is also working on the interplay between gender and the Romantic aesthetics of Hemans and Landon. Simon Bainbridge is Professor of Romantic Studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of the monographs Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), the editor of Romanticism: A Sourcebook (Basingstoke: Palgrave, now Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and has written many essays on the writing of the Romantic period. He is a past president of the British Society for Romantic Studies. He is currently working on projects on Romanticism and mountaineering and on the continuing British response to Napoleon Bonaparte. Ian Dennis received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and is now Professor in Romantic Literature at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (St. Martin s Press and Macmillan, 1997) and Lord Byron and the History of Desire (University of Delaware Press, 2009), and has published articles on Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and other Romantic novelists, and on Lord Byron. He is also a novelist; his most recent book of fiction is The Emperor s Assassin (Random House, 2003), a historical murder mystery co-authored under the pseudonym T. F. Banks. Joshua David Gonsalves is an assistant professor of English teaching nineteenth-century British Literature at the American University of xi

11 xii Contributors Beirut. His focus is Romanticism across the disciplines of geopolitics, film and animal studies, literary culture and cultural theory. He is at work on two books Keats Goes Global: Close Reading and the Geopolitics of Cultural Production and Screening War: The Construction of Geopolitics in Pre-Cinematic Mass Culture: and has recently published work on Wordsworth, Swinburne, and David Lynch. Matthew J. A. Green is Associate Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. His research concentrates on the relationship between literature and social change, with a particular emphasis on cultural inheritance, adaptation and appropriation. He is currently working on two books, an edited collection for Manchester University Press, Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition, and a monograph on William Blake and Alan Moore. He is also General Editor of the journal Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama. Jonathan Gross is Director of the Humanities Center and Professor of English at DePaul University. He is the author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and the editor of Byron s Corbeau Blanc : The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice University Press, 1997), Thomas Jefferson s Scrapbooks (2006), The Sylph (Northwestern, 2007), Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment (SUNY, 2006), and Belmour (Northwestern University Press, 2011). His articles on William Hazlitt, Freemasonry, and British Romanticism have appeared in SEL, Philological Quarterly, European Romantic Review, and other journals. Stephen Minta is Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at the University of York. He has written on French Renaissance poetry, on Petrarch, and on the Latin American novel. In 1998, he published On a Voiceless Shore, a study of Byron and Greece. Most recently, he has published essays on Joyce and Homer, and on aspects of Byron s relationship with Greece, Greek politics, and the War of Independence. His Aguirre (1993), the re-creation of a sixteenth-century journey across Latin America, was a New York Times Notable Book for Piya Pal-Lapinski is Associate Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Critical Theory. She is the author of The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (University Press of New England, 2005), and her current projects include a

12 Contributors xiii study of judicial torture and the Gothic, and a monograph on fashion, violence, and the novel. Tilottama Rajan is Distinguished University Professor and Canada Research Chair in English and Theory at the University of Western Ontario. She has published Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Cornell University Press, 1980), The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 1990), Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford University Press, 2002), and Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). She has also edited or coedited five books, most recently After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory (University of Toronto Press, 2002) and Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (SUNY, 2004). She is currently working on a book on encyclopedic thought and the organization of knowledge from German Idealism to deconstruction. Jane Stabler is Reader in Romantic Literature at the School of English, University of St Andrews. She is working on the Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of the Poems of Lord Byron and a monograph on the poetics of exile for Oxford University Press. Andrew M. Stauffer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he also directs the NINES federation of nineteenthcentury scholarship online ( He is the author of Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the editor of works by Robert Browning and H. Rider Haggard. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Byron Society of America, the Editorial Board of the Byron Journal, and the Advisory Board for the International Byron Society.