Please see below for a report by Julia Coole (Keele University) on ‘Byron and the Romantic World’, which BARS helped to support.
Conference Report: Byron and the Romantic World
On Friday 30th September Keele University hosted an undergraduate and postgraduate conference on Byron and Romanticism. This event developed from an annual conference which was previously hosted by Edge Hill University under the command of Dr Mary Hurst. This year, in the spirit of collaboration, Edge Hill teamed up with Keele for an inaugural event that sought to encourage undergraduate and postgraduate students from a range of institutions to meet, present, and potentially collaborate on future projects. As our speakers varied in levels of study between year two undergraduates, to PhD students on continuation, our mission was to provide a warm and insightful glimpse into the academic environment. This year Keele had the honour of hosting the event, and did so in the beautiful nineteenth-century mansion house, Keele Hall. The papers themselves were delivered in the appropriate location of the mansion’s Old Library.
Keele Hall, Staffordshire
The Old Library, Keele Hall, Staffordshire
The first panel consisted of two relatively old hands, Kimberley Braxton (a third-year PhD student from Keele University) and Kirsty Harris (who has just submitted her PhD thesis at Anglia Ruskin University), and was chaired by the renowned Byronist, Professor Bernard Beatty. Both speakers gave stimulating papers. Braxton’s handling of the relationship between Byron’s public “Byronic” persona, and the influence of the Byronic hero on the subsequent writing practices of the Brontë siblings, was truly insightful. Interesting distinctions were made between Emily Brontë’s appropriations of the Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights (1847), and Bramwell’s experimentation with Byronic ideals during the course of his personal life. Harris followed this paper with a discussion on metamorphosis in Byron’s “shipwreck” narratives, with a close focus on Canto II of Don Juan (1819-1824). In this paper, Harris discussed Byron’s apparent rejection of the deities which were “intrinsic to classical narratives”, which she argued allowed him to develop the idea of human regeneration and an idea of heroism which was not dictated by the divine. The question session for this panel was understandably animated, with the questions themselves being skilfully fielded by both speakers.
Kirsty Harris, PhD Candidate, Anglia Ruskin University
The next session was chaired by Edge Hill’s enigmatic Dr Andrew McInnes. Daniel Westwood (University of Sheffield) kicked off with an exploration of the monologue in Byron’s Manfred (1817). Whilst evaluating aspects of monodrama and monologue in Byron’s first adult play, Westwood interrogated the complexities that arose from “a work that is both attuned to the power of the monological and willing to embrace open-endedness.” With an emphasis on the ambiguity that these tensions present, Westwood sought to develop McGann’s ideas on Byron’s distinctions between lying and cant to show that neither label is quite appropriate for the “level of ambivalence” which surrounds this play. This paper was followed by two papers from Edge Hill University, both of whom were presented by students in their second year of undergraduate study. Megan Carney led the charge with a sophisticated analysis of the role of the servant in Gothic literature. Carney suggested that, through their unique role of simultaneously being and not-being, the agency of the servant is difficult to determine and, as a result, their presence can be compared to that of a ghost which is inextricably bound to a particular place though not active in the events which occur there. Soraya Atherton concluded this panel with a discussion of exile, with particular focus being placed on the exile of the Shelleys in the early nineteenth century. Atherton made astute comparisons between different kinds of exile, with a strong distinction being made between the morose ideas of exile demonstrated in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) with the more jubilant exile depicted in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) – in the later cantos in particular.
Megan Carney, Undergraduate, Edge Hill University
After a well-deserved lunch break and a tour of the iconic grounds at Keele Hall, the final panel (chaired by Keele’s own Hannah Scragg) commenced with an undergraduate student from Canterbury Christ Church University, Rosie Jackson-Horn. Jackson-Horn argued that Byron’s self-fashioned identity, which he took pains to develop throughout his oeuvre, can even be seen through his letters and epistles to his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Rather than “merely composing love-poems”, Jackson-Horn demonstrated that these too can be perceived as self-fashioning texts aimed at strengthening Byron’s already distinguished persona. Master’s student, Susannah Owen (Keele University), continued the theme of identity with a probing paper on the effects of the French Revolution on ideas of national identity. Moving away from Byron slightly, Owen referenced Benedict Anderson’s renowned Imagined Communities (1983) to discuss the ways in which writers such as Burke, Godwin and Percy Shelley responded to, and commented on, new ideas of community “held together not by a shared monarchical ruler, but through a shared national identity”. The final paper of the day was presented by Alexander Abichou, who starts a PhD at Durham University this year. His paper rounded the panel off with a discussion of representations of history in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. With particular emphasis on the discussion of the appropriation of the Elgin Marbles in Canto II, Abichou discussed Byron’s relationship to history and suggested that, to Byron, this appropriation of the marbles led to an idea of misplaced identity for the Greeks, which Byron attempted to reconcile through his narrative.
Alexander Abichou, PhD Candidate, Durham University
Our keynote speaker was greatly anticipated: Professor Drummond Bone from the University of Oxford did not disappoint. As a leading figure in Byron studies, and Romantic studies more generally, we could not have imagined a more appropriate speaker to end our day’s discussion, and were very thankful to Drummond Bone for supporting both our event, and our burgeoning academics. With a thought-provoking investigation into the impact of women on the English cantos of Don Juan, Drummond Bone provided a passionate and warming talk geared to incite further interest in, and appreciation for, Byron and Romantic studies.
Professor Drummond Bone, University of Oxford
Julia Coole, Keele University