Michael Macovski (Georgetown) is interested the extraordinary history of Byronic “gleanings”: the torn pages, disjointed leaves, found scraps, and manuscript fragments that circulated throughout the Byron’s life, particularly in both the grangerized, extra-illustrated forms and the personal commonplace books (collective scrapbooks, “albums” or “blank” books) of the era.
His paper for this session connects examples of such ‘gleanings’ with Byron’s own poetic practice, his intra-textual embedding, excerpting, and reincorporation of poets such as Moore, Rodgers, and Southey—as well as classical authors such as Quintilian, Virgil, and Horace. Taken together, these two approaches locate Byron within the larger history of nineteenth-century material culture, evolving publication forms, technological reproduction, literary reputation, indirect plagiary, and combinatory forms of Romantic-era publication.
James Armstrong (City University of New York) will trace the ongoing influence of Byron’s plays on dramatists that followed. Only one of Byron's plays was produced during his lifetime, but Manfred, Sardanapalus, and Werner all posthumously became fixtures on the Victorian stage and continued to influence avant-garde theatre artists for years to come. Future dramatists—including Eugene O'Neill, Romulus Linney, Tom Stoppard, and Jez Butterworth—were impacted not only by Byron's plays, but by his non-dramatic poetry and his unconventional life as well. Byron haunts not only 20th-century dramas, but continues to hold sway over contemporary playwrights like Butterworth, demonstrating his lasting legacy on the stage. This paper will examine Byron's influence on British and American theatre over the past 200 years, including the use of Byron by Modernist and Postmodern playwrights interested in using him and his work when analyzing the cultural struggles of our own day.
Finally, Gary Dyer will offer a synthesis both of these aspects of Byron’s legacy – the material documents and the intellectual content – in considering what we mean by “textuality.” Traditionally, literature scholars used the terms “texts” and “textual” to refer to the abstract states in which a literary work exists, so that textual criticism concerns itself with whether Hamlet’s flesh is “sullied” or “solid.” In more recent decades, scholars have emphasized the material media of expression, the specific physical artifacts. Dyer is interested in a third kind of “text”: the immaterial or “intellectual” states in which Byron’s poems could constitute literary property, because of the law of copyright. Textuality comprises all of these categories, and few writers have produced as many “texts” as Byron. The agents of Byron’s circulation were myriad, and by considering the complex history of intellectual property and copyright, we get a fuller picture of his ongoing circulation and legacy.
The session will be chaired by Lindsey Eckert (Florida State University), a distinguished scholar of Romantic book history, whose work on both material textuality and intellectual influence in the Byron circle makes her an ideal person to draw these papers together and lead the conversation that will follow.