Byron: Reality, Fiction and Madness

Josefina Tuominen-Pope examines the phenomenon of Byromania in the context of the debate about passing contemporary celebrity versus lasting posthumous fame, conducted in the Romantic periodical press. At the time, literary magazines were keen to establish their reputation against accusations of pandering to the popular taste for news about the private lives of literary figures, Byron’s being a prime example. The reviewers responded by advancing the contrary argument that Byron’s celebrity might turn into lasting fame, regarded as a mark of true achievement. In this way they not only validated their chosen genre and medium and thus the legitimacy of their own work, but also claimed their own place in literary history.

“Reception, Appropriation, Manipulation” is also the subject of the chapter by Agustín Coletes-Blanco (“Reception, Appropriation, Manipulation: Castelar’s Life of Lord Byron (1873) and its Critics”). Emilio Castelar (1832–1899) created Byron’s first Spanish biography, the Life of Lord Byron (1873), soon translated into Italian and into English (1875). Castelar’s biography seems to be more “balanced” than previously held views of the poet in that it departs from Byron’s image as un loco [‘a madman’], or un poeta satánico. Castelar’s “cultural appropriation” of Byron’s life and work is thus a more mature representation than that of his Spanish predecessors.

Christoph Bode’s essay, entitled “Byron’s Dis-orientations: The Giaour,” offers a narratological analysis of Byron’s tale to demonstrate how it dismantles the easy East–West binaries and preconceptions. He states at the beginning:

“It is safe to say, I believe, that in Lord Byron’s œuvre we find a radical dissolution of the dichotomy of identity and alterity, as well as of the dichotomies of authenticity and role-playing, of fiction and non-fiction, of fact and fake, since his epic and lyric poetry were read, in their own time, as revealingly autobiographical, while, curiously enough, at the same time the persona of Lord Byron can be shown to be a largely fictional construct that conforms to or follows the textual blueprint – all this in a drama that is supremely audience-related, because it is played out with the public (and not only with the reading public) as Lord Byron’s sparring partner: it is a conspicuously public self-fabrication, or self-fashioning, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase.”

Bernard Beatty, in a discussion entitled “Making Madness Beautiful: Byron at Work 1816–1817,” explores Byron’s personas and characters who are “disturbed captives,” analysing their “movement in and out of madness” and the relationship between madness and imagination. Beatty argues that the works of 1816–17 are a watershed in Byron’s writing. They not only introduce new literary forms, such as dramatic monologue, but also mark a “decisive turn,” after which the poet “makes poetry out of the very contingencies of life and consciousness which previously he was seeking to transcend.”