Byron, 1999

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE, TRANSLATED

Chu Chi, Yu.  "Lord Byron's 'The Isles of Greece': First Translations."  In Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918, ed. D. E. Pollard (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1998), 79-104.

Muldoon, Paul, ed.  The Essential Byron, by Lord Byron.  London: HarperCollins, 1999.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO BYRON

Accardo, Peter X.  "American Editions of Byron, 1811 to 1830."  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 93.4 (December 1999): 484-93.

Accardo presents the findings of a study of some 99 American editions of Byron's works published between 1811 and 1830. The study "will be of crucial interest to students of Byron's reputation and reception, to collectors of Byron, and to historians of the American reprint trade" (485). Accardo offers a summary of the "Key Findings" of his research and concludes with case studies of two works: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and The Giaour.

Accardo, Peter X.  "Byron in America to 1830."  Harvard Library Bulletin 9.2 (1998): n.p.

Alec-Smith, Alex.  "Appendix: Byron in Fiction, A List of Books."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 221-29.

As an appendix to a collection on "Byromania," Alec-Smith provides a list of works divided into four sections: 1. Novels with Byron as a central character, 2. Plays and films with published scripts that have Byron as a central character, 3. Books with characters somehow related to Byron, and 4. Works borrowed from Samuel Chew's bibliography that Alec-Smith has not seen.  The items are presented chronologically within these categories and range in date from 1816 (Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon) to the mid-1990s (Stoppard's Arcadia).

Bainbridge, Simon.  "From Nelson to Childe Harold: The Transformations of the Byronic Image."  BJ 27 (1999): 13-25.

Focusing principally on George Sanders's 1809 portrait of Byron, Bainbridge contends that most accounts of the Byron iconography have missed the fact that "Byron has himself represented in terms of the pre-eminent and already mythical hero of the hour, Horatio Nelson, an astonishing act of heroic self-conception and self-presentation that anticipates his more famous and ambiguous identification with the major world historic figure of the age, Napoleon Bonaparte" (13).  This initial heroic and very public image, Bainbridge argues, was transformed in later portraits into the figure of an "isolated and a-historical romantic wanderer."  Four plates.

Beatty, Bernard. "Calvin in Islam: a reading of Lara and The Giaour." Romanticism 5.1 (1999): 70-86.

Beatty identifies a link between Byron's oriental tales and an abiding interest in Calvinism.

Bradbury, Oliver C.  "Lord Byron's 1812 Visit to Cheltenham."  BJ 27 (1999): 97-101.

Burns, Allan D.  "Landor, Ianthe, and the 'Other Bards.'"  ELN 37.1 (September 1999): 56-64.

Burns suggests that Landor's "Ianthe" is a reference to his beloved Jane Swift; the use of the name "Ianthe," however, raises a number of questions about Landor's problematic relations with Byron and Shelley.

Cheeke, Stephen.  "Byron, History and the Genius Loci."  BJ 27 (1999): 38-50.

Cheeke concentrates on Byron's fascination with particular locations, or "spots": "These spots, particularly those associated with the famous dead, offer Byron sites of what I shall call in-placement, homes in eternity which are testimony to historical vindication and against which Byron measures himself" (38).  This emphasis on place presents Cheeke with an entry into the vexed issue of Byron—the wandering, out-of-place poet—and his relationship to a very tangible, material history associated with a distinct geographical site.  To use Cheeke's language: "the notion of a concentrated accretion of meaning and experience (being there on the spot) can offer a way of thinking more broadly about Byron and history, and the place of his work in the context of early nineteenth-century 'historical mindedness'" (38).

Christie, William.  "Going Public: Print Lords Byron and Brougham."  SIR 38.3 (Fall 1999): 443-75.

Christie's historically based essay examines the strained relations between Brougham and Byron and then considers more broadly the techniques by which each writer generated his public stature: "Byron and Brougham manufactured careers by 'going public.'  . . .  Both became proficient in manipulating and in extending [the public], though where Brougham had to work hard to create the type and size of a public by which he could be supported and his work justified and admired, the public that admired Byron created and collaborated to sustain him" (475).

Cochran, Peter.  "Byron's Manfred and Pellico's Francesca da Rimini."  Review of National Literatures and World Report 1 (1998): 73-86.

Cochran, Peter.  "International Byron Societies, 1998-1999."  BJ 27 (1999): 132-39.

Cochran, Peter.  "The Life of Bryon, or Southey Was Right."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 63-76.

Cochran surveys and reviews films in which Byron figures as a character.  These include James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), David Macdonald's The Bad Lord Byron (1948), Robert Bolt's Lady Caroline Lamb (1972), Ken Russell's Gothic (1986), Ivan Passer's Haunted Summer (1988), and Gonzalo Suarez's Rowing with the Wind (1988).

Cox, Jeffrey.  Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 

"Jeffrey N. Cox refines our conception of 'second-generation' Romanticism by placing it within the circle of writers around Leigh Hunt that came to be known as the Cockney School. Offering a theory of the group as a key site for cultural production, Cox challenges the traditional image of the Romantic poet as an isolated figure by recreating the social nature of the work of Shelley, Keats, Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, and others as they engaged in literary contests, wrote poems celebrating one another, and worked collaboratively on journals and other projects.  Cox also recovers the work of neglected writers such as John Hamilton Reynolds, Horace Smith, and Cornelius Webb as part of the rich social and cultural context of Hunt's circle.  This book not only demonstrates convincingly that a Cockney School existed, but shows that it was committed to putting literature in the service of social, cultural, and political reform."  And one might add to this reasonably accurate and comprehensive dustjacket description that Cox implicity reorganizes the now conventional way of arranging the later Romantic writers into various author-centered "circles"—e.g. "The Shelley Circle"—arguing instead for the designation of a distinct, unified, and prolific literary-cultural "School."

Crane, David.  Lord Byron's Jackal: The Life of Edward John Trelawny.  New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999.

Demata, Massimiliano.  "A Bibliography of Byron's Oriental Reading: Addenda and Correction."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 39-41.

Donelan, Charles.  Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's Don Juan: A Marketable Vice.  New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

The book offers a wide-ranging and complex argument regarding the poetics of Don Juan.  Donelan places the poem in the repressive cultural context dominated by the overt moral strictures of the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the overt political censorship of revolutionary ideological claims.  The genius of the poem, as Donelan has it, lies in its liberatory poetics, its Protean capacity to find freedom in the very air of repression: "Don Juan is the Romantic period's most comprehensive defence of freedom of expression and liberty of the imagination" (1).  One way the poem manages to both sidestep and satirize the evangelical censorship of the day lay in its capacity to foster male fantasy, and this capacity in turn rests on Byron's representations of women.  The portrayal of women, after all, becomes the foundation upon which Byron builds his version of Romantic masculinity: "the narrative persistently explores the role women play in the establishment and maintenance of masculine identity" (8).  In effect, the overarching argument—incorporating issues of gender, publishing history, cultural psychoanalytics, reader response, etc.—finds that Don Juan elicits the "marketable vice" of male fantasy at precisely the moment when a more direct, less merely suggestive discourse was considerably less marketable (in every sense of the term).

Eisler, Benita.  Byron—Child of Passion, Fool of Fame.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

This full-length biography is not directed primarily toward a scholarly audience, and the analytical or interpretive coverage of Byron's literary work is sparse. Nonetheless, the narrative of the impetuous aristocrat—the figure that inspired a century of "Byronism" and "Byromania"—is quite compelling, particularly in its coverage of the more scandalous moments of Byron's career.

Elfenbein, Andrew.  "Silver-Fork Byron and the Image of Regency England." In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  77-92.

Elfenbein begins by describing the dual images of Regency England—on the one hand, it is a time marked by lavish displays of gaudy wealth that mask a morally empty core, and, on the other hand, it is a period when the aristocratic classes took more than usual care to demonstrate a moral righteousness and disciplined personal behavior.  Having established these contradictory views, Elfenbein examines "why one image is so much more familiar than the other by looking at Byron's reception in early Victorian culture."  The analysis focuses on the portrayals of Byron in Disraeli's Venetia (1837) and Catherine Gore's Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841).  These "silver-fork" novels, particularly in their treatments of Byron's relations with women, "suggest the inadequacy of Regency values and the need for their ultimate supersession by the supposedly better world of Victorian England" (78).

Goldberg, Leonard S.  "'This gloom . . . which can avail thee nothing': Cain and Skepticism."  Criticism 41.2 (Spring 1999): 207-32.

An examination of Byron's Cain in light of a radical and extreme skepticism: "Cain, whose acts effectively deny that mind can, should, or need have anything to do with its objects, catastrophically deifies rationality as the way towards autonomous life" (207-08). 

Goulding, Christopher.  "From Byron to Babbage: Ada Lovelace's Adventures in Mathematics."  TLS 5036 (October 8, 1999): 16.

Graham, Peter W.  "His Grand Show: Byron and the Myth of Mythmaking."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  24-42.

Offering a kind of meditation on and historical survey of the distinctively Byronic mode of self-dramatization through an interplay of confession and concealment, Graham identifies the poet more with the ironies and feints of his narrators than with any of his characters, Byronic-heroic or otherwise. The essay concentrates primarily on Childe Harold and Don Juan, with passing reference to the "Detached Thoughts" journals and "On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year."

Hawley, Michelle Renee.  "Aesthetic Citizenship: Poetry and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1868-1874 (Victorian, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Lord Byron, James Thomson, Robert Browning, Republicanism, Liberalism)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Chicago, 1999, DAI, 60-06A (1999): 2038, 278 pages.

Hawley's study examines a crucial period in the political development of Victorian England, arguing that in the years 1868-1874 "the legacy of romanticism became central and conflicted terrain."  On the one hand, the radical Romantics (Blake, Byron, Shelley) were the impetus for a popular counter-politics; on the other, a selection of Romantic-era poetry was "swiftly being incorporated into the emergent 'literary tradition' as an affirmative symbol of national culture."

Holland, Tom.  "Undead Byron."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  154-65.

Holland presents a survey of vampire references in Byron's writing and comments on Byron's place in the popular history of vampires and vampirism.  Vampirism, in fact, fits well—both thematically and formally—into the poetry: "it is clear that Byron wrote as he gambled, or travelled, or had sex, with the restless agitation that enabled him to know that he existed, and was keeping satiation at bay: his great enemy in life was boredom; and his great object the discovery and experience of excitements.  His poetry can therefore fittingly be interpreted as both the record and the expression of a craving for fresh sensations—a true inspiration for the figure of the vampire, that bastard offspring of his genius and fame" (154).

Housley, Paul Simpson and Priya N. Kissoon.  "The Evaluative and Spiritual Dimensions of Mountains in 'Manfred.'"  BJ 27 (1999): 90-96.

Huber, Werner.  "Byronic Bioplays."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  93-108.

Huber considers three bioplays—Liz Lochhead's Blood and Ice, Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry, and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia—examining how these dramatic representations inevitably engage in a process of the deconstruction and fragmentation of the Byronic image.  Because of the formal conventions of dramatic (as opposed to, say, prose narrative) writing, "the biographical facts and motifs acquire additional significance, they begin to appear as signs, symbols, and metonymies pointing to, and representing, a sphere of reference beyond themselves (beyond the 'historical facts' of Byron's life)" (96).

Janssen, David Alan.  "Byromania: The Romantic Malady (Lord Byron, Poetry, Mania, Melancholy, Reception)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Georgia, 1999, DAI, 60-05A (1999): 1574, 212 pages.

With its theoretical foundations set most firmly in the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Lacan, this dissertation examines the phenomenon of "Byromania."  Janssen contends that "there exists in Byron's poetry a manic strain powerful enough to be contagious," and then argues that "the phenomenon of Byromania can be best understood as a mutual construction by Byron and his audience, which continues to inform critical readings of Byron well into the twentieth century." 

Jefferson, D. W. [Douglas William].  Three Essays: Johnson, Wordsworth, Byron.  Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1998.

Jones, Christine Kenyon.  "Fantasy and Transfiguration: Byron and His Portraits."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  109-36.

Jones focuses on the distinctly visual aspect of Byron's obsessive concern with self presentation, examining such matters as fashion, weight control, and (especially) the poet's concern for and use of his many portraits.  Jones concludes: "In the same way that his poetry provided the 'word' for his readers, the visual images which he authorised in turn created the 'outline' upon which his public—both female and male 'Byromaniacs'—have fantasised the poet, building visions which have transfigured him and effectively rendered him immortal" (132).  Four plates.

Jones, Christine Kenyon.  "'Man Is a Carnivorous Production': Byron and the Anthropology of Food."  Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 6 (1998): 41-58.

Kelsall, Malcolm.  "Reading Orientalism: Woman or Ida of Athens."  Review of National Literatures and World Report 1 (1998): 11-20.

Kim, Eugene Eric and Betty Alexandra Toole.  "Ada and the First Computer."  Scientific American  May 1999: 76-81.

This historical/biographical article discusses Byron's daughter's collaboration with the mathematician and innovator Charles Babbage.  One product of this collaboration was a set of notes by Ada Lovelace containing insights that prefigure the work of twentieth-century computer scientists.

Logan, William.  "Four or Five Motions Toward a Poetics."  Sewanee Review 107.2 (Spring 1999): 244-59.

An essay primarily on reader-response stylistics focuses in part on Wordsworth (a London sonnet) and Byron (Don Juan).

Loo, Tessa de.  Een varken in het paleis.  Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1998.

The book discusses primarily Byron's experience in Albania, particularly his meeting with the Ali Pasha.  In Dutch. 

Lupak, Mario J. Byron as a Poet of Nature: The Search for Paradise.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen P, 1999.

Lussier,  Mark S.  Romantic Dynamics: A Poetics of Physicality.   New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Romantic Dynamics is a radically interdisciplinary work.  Lussier identifies parallels between, on the one hand, the concepts and metaphors of twentieth-century physics and cosmology and, on the other, the concerns of Romantic-era poetry with physical reality and its apperception by the psyche.  Both areas—recent physics and Romantic poetry—are struck by questions of indeterminacy, relativity, and complexity.  Lussier describes the resulting dynamic models of reality and consciousness in the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and the Shelleys. 

McDayter, Ghislaine.  "Conjuring Byron: Byromania, Literary Commodification and the Birth of Celebrity."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 43-62.

Focusing on the commodification of literature—especially Byron's literature—during the Romantic period, McDayter suggests that "this well-known imagery of metaphysical angst [about having one's sublime visions sullied by an uncomprehending and vulgar public] simultaneously veils, even as it reveals, an underlying material concern for writers in the literary market of the time" (44).  The processes of commodification are likened to a relationship of vampirism and victimization which McDayter sees as prefiguring the alienation of labor that later became so central to analyses of Victorian economics: "What this essay will explore is the manner in which this gothic language of monstrosity and consumption . . . in some respects does the cultural work of actually writing the emergent discourse of production and commodification that intellectuals such as Marx would ultimately develop and amplify in their own work" (44).  The process of commodification—both of poetry and of poets—signifies, in McDayter's phrase, the "industrialisation of Romanticism" (44).

Nicholson, Andrew.  "Byron and Ovid."  BJ 27 (1999): 76-81.

O'Connor, Ralph. "Mammoths and Maggots: Byron and the Geology of Cuvier." Romanticism 5.1 (1999): 26-42.

Focusing primarily on the late play "Cain," O'Connor suggests that Byron was influenced by Cuvier's geological research, especially insofar as that research began to raise doubts about the truth of Genesis.

Oueijan, Naji B.  "Western Exoticism and Byron's Orientalism."  Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 6 (1998): 27-39.

Oueijan, Naji B.  A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron's Oriental Tales.  New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Part historical and cultural study and part reference work, Oueijan's book opens with chapters describing Byron's experience as traveller and student of Eastern cultures and sketching the compositional backgrounds of the oriental tales.  The long central chapter consists of an extensive, alphabetically organized encyclopedia of oriental elements in Byron's poetry wherein one can look up individual terms and place names (e.g. "Giaour" and "Abydos"), character names (e.g. "Gulnare" and "Leila"), and broader categories of Eastern culture (e.g. "Adultery" and "Marriage").  The book concludes with several brief appendices that list Byron's reading in orientalism, language and literature, and travel writing; there is also a useful bibliography of secondary materials for students of orientalism in Byron.

Pitha, J. Jakub.  "Narrative Theory and Romantic Poetry (Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron)."  Ph.D. diss., U of South Carolina, 1999, DAI, 60-04A (1999): 1146, 183 pages.

Pitha sees lyric poetry and narrative poetry as "points on a continuum of narrative" rather than as distinct modes of literary production.  Having thus formulated these generic categories, the dissertation offers readings of Romantic-era poems using the techniques of narrative theory.  With respect to the later Romantics, Pitha focuses most closely on Keats ("Grecian Urn," Eve of St. Agnes) and Byron (Don Juan).

Pont, Graham.  "Byron and Nathan: A Musical Collaboration."  BJ 27 (1999): 51-65.

A detailed historical account of of the Nathan/Byron collaboration that produced the Hebrew Melodies. Pont concentrates especially on the musical settings of the poems. As Pont puts it, "The musical side of Byron's life has been very inadequately covered by his biographers" (53), and the article helps to make up for this deficit.

Ragaz, Sharon.  "'The Truth in Masquerade': Byron's Don Juan and Walter Scott's The Antiquary."  KSJ 48 (1999): 30-34.

Identifies the source of Byron's line "The truth in masquerade" (Don Juan, IX) in Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816).  The borrowing, which Ragaz suggests is likely unconscious, is important because "the Byron text refers explicitly to the difficulties of writing true history, [thus] it is not improbable that Byron had in mind Scott's historical novel and his extended series of meditations on fiction-making and history" (33-4).

Raizis, M. Byron.  "Childe Harold's Offspring, English and American."  BJ 27 (1999): 26-37.

Raizis surveys several Childe Harold imitations and continuations.  The account of the various poems, though chiefly introductory and evaluative, offers much material relevant both to the reception (often critical) of Byron's poem and to the emergence on an international scale of "Byronism" itself.  Works discussed include Clare's Child Harold, William Lisle Bowles's "Childe Harold's Last Pilgrimage," Hemans's Modern Greece: A Poem; the American works include John Parker's The Pilgrimage of Ormond, or Childe Harold in the New World (1831), John Augustus Shea's Adolph (also 1831), and Frederick William Thomas's The Emigrant, or Reflections While Descending the Ohio (1833).

Ralston, Ramona M. and Sidney L. Sondergard.  "Screening Byron: The Idiosyncrasies of the Film Myth."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 137-53.

Ralston and Sondergard consider seven different film representations of Byron: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Bad Lord Byron (1948), Lady Caroline Lamb (1972), Gothic (1986), Remando al viento [Rowing with the Wind] (1988), Haunted Summer (1988), and Frankenstein Unbound (1990).  The authors conclude with a listing of several general characteristics of the Byron myth.  As represented in film, Byron is marked by "an attitude of determined and notorious unconventionality," by being "sexually attractive and profligate," and by being a "generally corruptive influence [with] a propensity for cruel insensitivity" (149).  In addition, the portrayals of Byron are typically modeled on Byron's portraits; they see him as charming, witty, handsome, and troubled by the unspoken hardships of his past (sometimes signified by his limp); they emphasize his aristocratic roots; and they assume his genius as a poet, though this genius is never demonstrated.

Rawes, Alan.  "'Tears, and Tortures, and the Touch of Joy' in 'The Dream.'"  BJ 27 (1999): 82-89.

Rawes, Alan.  "Visionary Moments and the March of Time: The Influence of Wordsworth in Childe Harold I and II."  KSJ 48 (1999): 129-37.

Rawes identifies structural parallels between the lyrical segments of the opening cantos of Childe Harold and the "Greater Romantic Lyrics" (Abrams' term) of Wordsworth and Coleridge.  Focusing more specifically on Wordsworth, Rawes contends that "the form and thematic development of Childe Harold I and II are the direct result not only of Byron's adoption of various features drawn from Wordsworth's lyric verse, but also of a profound opposition to Wordworth's characteristic idealization of consciousness and memory" (129).

Rishmawi, G. K.  "The Muslim East in Byron's Don Juan."  PLL 35.3 (Summer 1999): 227-43.

Rishmawi suggests that comparing Byron's portrayals of the East in the early tales to his portrayals of the East in Don Juan reveals a development in the poet's attitudes—essentially a movement from passionate commitment to a more disengaged, literary, and cosmopolitan wit.

"Risk of Collapse of Newstead Abbey, Ancestral Home of Lord Byron."  Official Journal of the European Communities: Information and Notices.  41.134 (1998): 100.

Sales, Roger.  "The Loathsome Lord and the Disdainful Dame: Byron, Cartland and the Regency Romance."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 166-83.

The essay offers a detailed examination of the "wicked" and "rakish" characters in the Regency novels of the puritanical but prolific Barbara Cartland.  Sales finds that these characters often seem to be modeled on Byron—or at least on the Byron myth—but that the "real" Byron is rather different from his romance-novel representations.  "Cartland's debauched and yet also rather suburban aristocrats are permitted to lead a Byronic lifestyle, but only on condition that they reject it dramatically and emphatically when at last true love crosses their paths.  Somebody should have mentioned this to loathsome Lord Byron.  Perhaps, poor dear, he just never met the right girl or boy" (181).

Simpkins, Scott.  "'Crises of Address': Speech-Shifting and Negative Solidarity in Byron's Lara."  Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 4.1 (Spring 1999): 19-35.

Simpkins' abstract: "Theorists of masculinity argue that men face 'role stress' due to the conflicting codes that are employed to construct a performance of manhood. Lord Byron's verse tales provide particularly good illustrations of this as his antiheroic men constantly battle each other partly because of the incompatibility they create for themselves through their conception of masculine behavior. Byron's Lara demonstrates this when two males confront each other in a public standpoint that places their masculine status at risk. The semiotic clash that occurs reveals the extent to which 'masculinity' is extremely vulnerable as a signified entity." The subsequent semiotic/rhetorical analysis concludes with the observation that "characters like Lara seem to bring about their own misfortune by virtue of their retarded conception of what it means to act like a man" (33).

Soderholm, James.  "Byronic Confession."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 184-94.

The "Byronic Confession" of the title, Soderholm explains, is "a mode of presentation in which disguise and disclosure intermix and where the aim is not forgiveness of self-expiation, but rather rhetorically evoking various responses in one's audience in order to manipulate one's own image" (184).  This is a line of autobiographical writing that stems most directly from Rousseau and thus contrasts with the Augustinian theodicial autobiographical writing that one sees in, for example, Wordsworth's Prelude. 

Sorensen, Peter J.  "Blake as Byron's Biographer: An Anthroposophic Reading of The Ghost of Abel."  WC 30.3 (Summer 1999): 161-65.

Spence, Gordon.  "Byron, Enoch, Calvin and the Deluge."  BJ 27 (1999): 66-75.

Stabler, Jane, ed.  Byron.  London and New York: Longman, 1998.

A collection of essays and excerpts aimed principally at a student readership and designed to consider Byron from a diverse range of critical vantage points.

Stabler, Jane.  "Women and Children First: Charles Lamb, Lord Byron and the Nineteenth-Century Readership."  CLB 105 (January 1999): 2-15.

Stabler identifies some surprising parallels and points of contact between Lamb and Byron, perhaps the most important of which is that both writers "sustain a playful and ironic dialogue with their readers, questioning the 'correct' taste of the time" (14). This leads to the conclusion that the work of the two writers shows evidence of "a campaign to reform the English stage and English culture more widely. In this, they had more in common with each other than is usually acknowledged, and at the heart of their reforming beliefs was the knowledge that if literary taste in England was to be changed, it would have to begin with comedy in its broadest sense, and with attitudes to women and children first" (15).

Stauffer, Andrew M.  "The Pleasures (and Pains) of Memory: Byron, Rogers, and Henry F. R. Soame."  N&Q  46.4 (1999): 459-61.

Stauffer identifies Henry Francis Robert Soame as the author of a poem beginning "Pleasures of memory! Oh supremely blest" that was for a time attributed to Byron and that was published by Samuel Rogers.

Stauffer, Andrew M.  “The Hero in the Harem: Byron’s Debt to Medieval Romance in Don Juan VI.”  ERR 10.1 (Winter 1999): 84-97.

Relying on both structural and historical evidence, Stauffer contends that Byron used some version of the Floire and Blancheflor romance as the basis for the Dudú episode of Don Juan VI.  This identification of the source is significant, Stauffer argues, because it shows that Byron (like Keats) saw in the romance "a naïve poetry which could be redeployed to create frankly erotic scenes undisturbed by characters' self-consciousness or guilt" (92).

Tambling, Jeremy.  "Henry James's American Byron."  The Henry James Review 20.1 (Winter 1999): 43-50.

Tambling contends that the character of Jeffrey Aspern (The Aspern Papers) is modeled on Byron's writings about being an expatriate in Italy.

Taylor, Brian W.  "Annabella, Lady Noel-Byron: A Study of Lady Byron on Education."  History of Education Quarterly 38.4 (Winter 1998): 430-55.

Biographical study highlights Lady Byron's efforts as a theorist and practitioner in education.  The essay applauds her philanthropic work and strives to see Lady Byron in her own right, not merely as a footnote to her famously estranged husband.

Whissel, Cynthia.  “’Tis more than what is called mobility’: Structure and a Development towards Understanding in Byron’s Don Juan.”  RoN 13 (February 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/donjuan.html>.

Whissel addresses the issue of structure (or lack thereof) in Don Juan, finding a kind of emotional continuity or pattern in the three major divisions of the text (cantos 1-5, 6-10, 11-end).  The analyses of these emotional patterns "led to the conclusion that far from being planless and unstructured, the poem was a model of logical development or intellectual growth as defined by Hegel’s dialectic."  The analyses are quantitative, carried out by computer and a "Dictionary of Affect."

Whitaker, Thomas R.  Mirrors of Our Playing.  Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999.

In a book chiefly about twentieth-century drama, Whitaker contends—interestingly—that many of the standard works of the contemporary theater have been heavily influenced by Byron.  Most writers on the theater point to Shakespeare as the abiding ancestral presence.  "But the distinctive accents of our theater—from Wilde and Shaw to Williams, Brenton, and Stoppard—owe as much to the more elusive presence of another poet and dramatist, Lord Byron" (139).

White, Mary Gassaway.  "Writers Among Friends: A Historical Study of Writing Groups."  Ph.D. diss., U of Southwestern Louisiana, 1999, DAI, 60-04A (1999): 1117, 360 pages.

This dissertation examines the form and function of various "writing groups" including, among others, Coleridge and the Wordsworths, and Byron and the Shelleys.  The emphasis is on rhetoric and composition theory.

Whittier, Ellen Dorothy.  "Concentrated Ground: The Body as Poetic Play Space in Shakespeare, Byron, Chaplin and Hugo (William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Charlie Chaplin, Victor Hugo, France)."  Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Buffalo, 1999, DAI, 60-05A (1999): 1546, 203 pages.

The dissertation examines the representations of bodies within texts, considering them "as potential spaces for exploring, questioning, and reconceiving various aspects of artistic composition and audience response."  The section on Byron focuses on disability: "the blending of body and text helps [Byron] create one of the first innovative works about disability as complex, even paradoxical identity[.]"

Wilkes, Joanne.  Lord Byron and Madame de Staël:  Born for Opposition.  Aldershot, Brookfield VT:  Ashgate, 1999.

A detailed and well-researched account of the relations—both literary and personal—between Byron and de Staël. 

Wilson, Frances, ed.  Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture.  Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999.

An interesting and useful collection of essays focusing on the extraordinary reputation of Byron in Victorian England and after.  Wilson's introduction (pp. 1-23) presents the immediate historical and biographical contexts and then surveys the rise and promulgation of "Byronism."  The central issue throughout is as much about fame, stardom, and the cult of personality as it is about Byron himself.  As Wilson puts it, "These essays explore something of the strange relation between Byron's identity—on and off the page—and the fantasies of readers, and the identity of readers—on and off the page—and the fantasies of Byron.  They tell the tale of how it is that Byron, anticipated by his hero, 'left a Corsair's name to other times, / Link'd with one virtue and a thousand crimes'" (21).

Wilson, Frances.  "'An Exaggerated Woman': The Melodramas of Lady Caroline Lamb."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 195-220.

"This essay will ask why the appearance of Caroline Lamb always turns a drama into a melodrama; why it is only melodrama which can contain the complex and intricate tales of Byron's most unhappy, gifted, and artful lover" (196).  Wilson pursues the question through several representations of the Lamb/Byron affair in three biographies (Cecil's Lord Melbourne, Blyth's Caro: The Fatal Passion, and Leslie's This For Caroline), three novels (Disraeli's Venetia, Moore's He Loved But One, and Ward's The Marriage of William Ashe), and finally in Lamb's own fictional account in Glenarvon.  The essay concludes with an evocative comparison of Lady Caroline Lamb to Diana, Princess of Wales—both figures whose public images came to overburden the historical self.

Wilson, Lisa Marie.  "Pen Names: Marketing Authorship in a Romantic 'Age of Personality,' 1780-1830 (Matthew G. Lewis, Charlotte King, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Robinson)."  Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Buffalo, 1999, DAI, 60-02A (1999): 437, 209 pages.

The dissertation examines the delicate balancing act that writers and publishers played during the Romantic period, a balance between, on the one hand, establishing literary celebrity and authority and, on the other, avoiding "charges of unseemly self-promotion."  This process was itself engaged in the broader cultural movement of the commercialization of literature and of authorship itself.  The fundamental terms of the study enable fresh analyses of such problematic issues as the status of biographical criticism and the strategies of anonymity and pseudonymity.  The key texts are by Matthew "Monk" Lewis, Charlotte King (a.k.a. "Rosa Matilda" and "Charlotte Dacre"), Mary "Perdita" Robinson, Walter Scott, and Byron.  These writers' careers "reveal the contradictions inherent in the discourse of Romantic authorship, which demanded that authors market themselves successfully—without appearing to do so."

Wise, Derek.  "Byroniana: Report from the Sale Rooms and Booksellers."  BJ 27 (1999): 127-31.

Wolfreys, Julian.  Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

An extended discussion of literary representations of the city with particular attention to the relationship between individual self and urban space.  The book covers writers from Blake through Dickens and Engels; chapter two focuses on Byron, Shelley, and Barbauld.

Woodward, Christopher.  "Newstead Exhibition, Nottinghamshire."  Country Life, 27 May 1999: 142.

Zani, Steven J.  "B is for Byron: Constructing Romanticism(s).  The Creation of the Byron Figure (Lord Byron, Romanticism, Identity)."  Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Binghamton, 1999, DAI, 60-04A (1999): 1149, 204 pages.

From Zani's abstract: "The dissertation focuses on the dynamics of both identity production in the biographies of Byron, and the production of 'Romanticism' itself in the texts that surround and define his life.  It depends upon the critical insights of Lacan, Benjamin, Foucault and De Man, among others.  From this perspective, I explore the degree to which Byron's supposed narcissism, education, and genius, while always components of Western identity as such, became exaggerated as the truth of identity in the Romantic period, and have encoded our traditional understanding of 'Romanticism' as a literary period."