{"id":6656,"date":"2026-10-27T01:02:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T01:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6656"},"modified":"2026-10-27T01:02:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T01:02:19","slug":"five-questions-jonathan-gross-on-the-european-byron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=6656","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Jonathan Gross on The European Byron<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jonathan Gross is Professor of English at DePaul University<\/a>. He was Joint-President of the International Association of Byron Societies and is the author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal<\/em> (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). His other publications include The Life of Anne Damer<\/em> (Bloomsbury, 2013); editions of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire\u2019s The Sylph<\/em> (Northwestern, 2007), Anne Damer\u2019s Belmour<\/em> (Northwestern, 2012), and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire\u2019s Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment<\/em> (SUNY, 2004); and Thomas Jefferson\u2019s Scrapbooks<\/em> (Steerforth, 2006). His monograph The European Byron: Mobility, Cosmopolitanism, and Chameleon Poetry<\/em><\/a>, which we discuss below, was published by Anthem Press last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) How did you first become interested in Byron\u2019s European engagements?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Byron conferences in Gdansk, Athens, Venice, Paris, and Valladolid prompted research in specific areas.\u00a0On one occasion, I was waiting for a vaporetto and saw Byron\u2019s name inscribed on a plaque in Venice; that influenced the cover of my book. Henry James\u2019 The Aspern Papers<\/em> and even novels based on Byronic figures prompted further research. Prof. Gregory Dowling was a great help in securing a visit to Byron’s Palazzo Mocenigo, providing opportunities to share insights at conferences that he helped organize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) How did you arrive at the book\u2019s structure, with the first half examining Byron\u2019s debts to European writers, and the second focusing on Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The structure was the hardest thing. I wrote papers on Byron over a ten-year period, starting with Prof. Naji Oueijan\u2019s conference in Lebanon, for which I penned the marginalia essay (influenced by Alex Watson’s Romantic Marginality<\/em> [2016]).\u00a0Though many monographs and edited collections have been assembled on Byron\u2019s European influence, with distinct chapters written by specialists in the field (Paul Graham Trueblood’s Byron\u2019s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth\u2011Century Europe<\/em> [1981], Richard Cardwell’s Lord Byron the European<\/em> [1997], Peter Cochran’s Byron’s European Impact <\/em>[2015] and Nic Panagopoulos’s excellent and overlooked edited volume The Place of Lord Byron in World History <\/em>[2013]), they do not always engage with Byron\u2019s influence in Poland and Russia, which brought up issues of whether these countries see themselves as part of Europe. That led to the further question of what is Europe?\u00a0Byron wrote a poem entitled \u201cMazeppa\u201d that has had such a rich history, inspiring Pushkin\u2019s \u201cPoltava\u201d and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky\u2019s Mazepa<\/em>.\u00a0While specialists have much to say about a writer\u2019s influence in a specific country, I wanted to take a cosmopolitan approach, and to see if that was possible after the Cold War. Prof. Maria Kalinowska helped arrange a lecture at the University of Warsaw which was crucial to the development of this book. I would be remiss if I did not thank Prof. Jerome McGann and Prof. Bernard Beatty, who read drafts and helped sharpen the structure, which was becoming dangerously inchoate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3) What for you are the most important things we gain by considering Byron\u2019s cosmopolitan European identity?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Byron\u2019s ability to capture a country\u2019s identity through a specific character\u2014particularly his portrait of the Ukrainian hetman\u2014offers a quicksilver history of Europe and how countries like Ukraine, Russia, and Poland were inspired by his nationalist example (\u201cWho would be free themselves must strike the blow?\/ Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!\u201d [Childe Harold\u2019s Pilgrimage<\/em> 2:76]).\u00a0The fact that he appealed to writers as distinct as Mickiewicz and Pushkin demonstrates his cosmopolitan appeal. Byron\u2019s influence does not end in Italy or Greece. His “Vision of Judgement” showed how irreverent he could be towards George III; Pushkin, in turn, implicitly criticized czarist censorship of his works. Mickiewicz\u2019s Forefathers\u2019 Eve <\/em>(1832) anticipates Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” (1833), with both works addressing imperial power and Czar Peter the Great. Like no other British writer, perhaps, Byron inspired painters (Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix), musicians (Hector Berlioz), and sculptors (Bertel Thorwaldsen). In North America,\u00a0Byron influenced Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave<\/em>, which includes epigraphs from Thomas Moore and Byron. During the Harlem Renaissance, many writers visited Pushkin\u2019s\u00a0statue, such as Langston Hughes, winning prizes named after the Russian poet sponsored by Opportunity Magazine<\/em> (Arna Bontemps won in 1926 and 1927).\u00a0I trace some of these influences to the racial politics of\u00a0Byron’s “The Island” or the stanzas on political freedom in “The Giaour” and “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”.\u00a0Writers adopted Byron’s sartorial style, his witty repartee, and his dashing improvisational methods, especially Mickiewicz, who translated \u201cThe Giaour\u201d and “Darkness” (Ciemno\u015b\u0107<\/em>\u00a0), and Pushkin, who was fascinated by Byron\u2019s sacrifice in Greece. I studied Polish for three years, rather unsuccessfully I might add, to help the book along.\u00a0I was amazed and humbled by the standard of scholarship on Pushkin and Mickiewicz (A Different Mickiewicz<\/em>\u00a0by Michal Kuziak [2022] comes to mind), and the work of such critics as Miros\u0142awa Mozdrewska <\/em>(especially Poland’s Angry Romantic<\/em> [2009], which she edited with Peter Cochran and Bill Johnston). Prof. Mozdrewska has written about Byron’s influence on the Solidarity movement in Poland, especially Adam Mickiewicz’s translated lines from Byron which were pinned to a monument in the Gdansk shipyards; she arranged a spectacular conference in Gdansk that inspired me to study Polish. Maria Janion’s important work underpins many of the arguments I make in the second half of the volume.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4) What were your most surprising discoveries while researching and writing this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was surprised to learn that Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod<\/em>\u00a0had its premiere in St. Petersburg; his future mother-in-law Maria Szymanowska provided musical settings, some of which were sung by his future wife and Maria’s daughter, Celina. Music and politics intertwine. I was surprised by the friendship between Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin and Mickiewicz during their Parisian exile; the origins of Pan Tadeusz<\/em>, written in Paris, and its debt to Byron\u2019s Don Juan<\/em>; the relationship between Pushkin\u2019s \u201cPoltava\u201d and Byron\u2019s \u201cMazeppa\u201d, and what that has to teach us about the current situation in Ukraine; and the links between \u201cEugene Onegin\u201d and Don Juan<\/em>, rarely discussed in British books on Byron. The Chopin\/Mickiewicz\/George Sand circle was also fun to explore, as were Mickiewicz\u2019s mysticism, Towianism and Frankism, and his death while raising a Jewish battalion during the Crimean War. I think George Sand\u2019s reading of Mickiewicz\u2019s Forefathers\u2019 Eve<\/em> and its relationship to Byron\u2019s Manfred<\/em> is important to consider. Through a strange coincidence, I happened to visit Mickiewicz\u2019s grave in Istanbul (thanks to Prof. Piya Pal Lapinski\u2019s research) on the anniversary of his death, which inspired the second half of my book and my further focus on Adam Mickiewicz’s writings. I then visited archives in Warsaw, Paris, and Lithuania, struck by Mickiewicz\u2019s expulsion from college because of the Philomath society (1817), his arrest, and the documentation of that in Forefathers\u2019 Eve<\/em>. Finally, I was amazed at Mickiewicz\u2019s range of reference: his friendship with Margaret Fuller, editor of The Dial<\/em>, who met Mickiewicz in 1847, and his references to Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Fenimore Cooper\u2019s The Spy<\/em>, as well as his famous, ground-breaking lectures at the Sorbonne on Slavic studies.\u00a0Of course, Polish schoolchildren and scholars\u00a0such as Warclaw Lednicki and Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz (The Land of Ulro<\/em>) have known about him for a long time!\u00a0I had much catching up to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5) What new projects are you currently working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am working on a project on women, hip hop and their relationship to Mexican muralism, especially as manifested in Los Angeles by the work of Judy Baca, Barbara Carrasco, and film-maker Agnes Varda (Mur Murs<\/em>). As a New Yorker, I was influenced by the graffiti movement of the 1980s; this project traces democracy on the walls to Chicana muralists, and draws on my previous book, Words of the Prophets<\/em> (Brill, 2023). Words of the Prophets<\/em> includes a discussion of Byron\u2019s inscriptions at the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, and Blake\u2019s fascination with \u201cAmerica\u201d, a topic treated by Jos\u00e9 Clemente Orozco\u2019s \u201cThe Epic of American Civilization\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Gross is Professor of English at DePaul University. He was Joint-President of the International Association of Byron Societies and is the author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Rowman and… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6656"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6665,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656\/revisions\/6665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}