Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. Letter to F.T. Palgrave, Rome 21 June, 1849. The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. by Frederick L. Mulhauser, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), I, p. 260. [Hereafter CAHC.] Clough went in person to Mazzini to obtain permission to view certain collections that had been closed during the siege. Palgrave’s father had written the Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), published by John Murray. 2. CAHC, I, pp. 253–4. 3. CAHC, I, p. 256. 4. CAHC, I, pp. 262–3. 5. Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, including the Papal States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria (London: John Murray, 1843), p. 296. See James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 119–25. The preface to Murray’s third edition, which included poetic extracts, promised increased enjoyment ‘knowing how much the perusal of [such extracts] on the spot, where the works themselves are not to be procured, will enhance the interest of seeing the objects described’, A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent (London: Murray, 1942), no page number. I discuss the notion of being ‘on the spot’ at length in my first chapter. 6. William Hazlitt, ‘Byron and Wordsworth’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt ed. by P.P. Howe (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1932), vol. 20, p. 156. I discuss this further in Chapter 1. The notion of treading histori- cally overburdened or haunted places is itself a classical commonplace, so that in Byron there is an anxiety about responding authentically to places which recall earlier writers who have already worried about the ghosts of history. See, for example, Cicero’s description of Athens in De finibus, V, ii: ‘quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliqua historia vestigium ponimus’ [‘wherever we go we tread historic ground’], Cicero: De finibus Bonorum et Malorum, translated by H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1914), pp. 396–7. I am indebted to Andrew Nicholson for drawing my attention to this passage. 7. ‘In asserting that “travel” acquires its special value by virtue of its differen- tial relationship with “tourism”, I intend to suggest that the two together make up a binary opposition fundamental to and characteristic of modern culture’, Buzard, p. 18. 8. ‘An Italian Carnival’ (1823), Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. by Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 190–1. 9. The literature of this encounter is vast, but important summarising collec- tions of essays begin with William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson Housley (eds), Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), and two significant Routledge collections 198 Notes 199 of the early 1990s: Trevor J. Barnes and James Duncan (eds), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); and James Duncan and David Ley (eds), Place/Culture/Representation (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). See also Kenneth E. Foote and Kent Mathewson (eds), Re-Reading Cultural Geography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), and Sara Blair, ‘Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary’, in American Literary History, 10, 3 (1998) 544–67. 10. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by M. Jolas (Boston: Orion, 1964). See also Ti-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice Hall, 1974); Robert Harbinson, Eccentric Spaces (Cambridge Mass.; MIT Press, 1977); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and more recently Patricia Yaeger’s call for a ‘new poetics of geography’ in The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 18. 11. Sara Blair’s article (cited above) offers the best summary of the ‘new geogra- phy’ as it has emerged from the thinking of Edward Soja, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey and above all, Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, trans- lated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Levebvre’s influential notion of l’espace vécu Blair summarises as: ‘the simultaneously abstract and material lineaments of our social emplacement, a locatedness and relationality at once lived and socially constitutive’ (557). 12. ‘Place is… that within and with respect to which subjectivity is itself estab- lished… place is not founded on subjectivity, but is rather that on which subjectivity is founded. Thus one does not first have a subject that appre- hends certain features of the world in terms of the idea of place; instead, the structure of subjectivity is given in and through the structure of place’, J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 35. See also Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993); and The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Stephen Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Jon May and Nigel Thrift (eds), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 13. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930 [1929]) vol. 12 of The Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 256–9. J.E. Malpas summarises the Greek and Roman memory system known as the ‘method of loci’ which operated through ‘the association of particular memories with particular “places” or “loci” within a system of such places’, Malpas, p. 106. For ‘a dialogue between and within’ the discourses of psychoanalysis and geography, see in particular the work of Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 8. 14. See, for example, David Simpson’s chapters on ‘Localism, Local Knowledge and Literary Criticism’, and ‘Romanticism and Localism’ in The Academic 200 Notes Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), and Alan Liu’s important essay, ‘Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail’, Representations, 32 (Fall, 1990) 75–113. Thinking about Romanticism and place has been renewed with especial vigour in the last decade in the field of travel-writing and colonial studies. For a recent example, see Amanda Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Jonathan Bate has discussed Wordsworth’s ‘sacramental’ notions of place (including his use of that key-word ‘spot’) in Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 85–115. See also Ralph Pite, ‘How Green Were the Romantics’, Studies in Romanticism, 35 (1996) 357–73. 15. See Malcolm Kelsall, ‘The Sense of Place and the Romantic Cosmopolite’, Literaria Pragensia, 3:5 (1993) 28–41; Kirsten Daly, ‘Worlds Beyond England: Don Juan and the Legacy of Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism’, Romanticism, 4:2 (1998) 189–201. 16. BLJ, VIII, p. 108. 17. Stephen Bann has argued that an increase in a consciousness of history at the beginning of the nineteenth century was ‘one of the most potent causes, and one of the most widespread effects of Romanticism. An irre- versible shift had occurred, and history – from being a localized and specific practice within the cultural typology – became a flood that overrode all disciplinary barriers and, finally, when the barriers were no longer easy to perceive, became a substratum to almost every type of cultural activity’, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), pp. 6–7. See also Richard J. Quinones, ‘Byron’s Cain: Between History and Theology’, in Byron, the Bible, and Religion: Essays from the Twelfth International Byron Seminar, ed. by Wolf Z. Hirst (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991): ‘More than any other prior generation, Byron’s represents a generation that has been thrown into history. And Byron is the most perspicacious spokesman for this fact. In the turmoil of his intellect he showed the true consequences of the dawning of the age of history. He saw and reacted desperately against the scepticism that was the natural product of this “historicism”.’ (p. 55). 18. ‘Byron’s early Calvinism, though rejected, left him with the idea of a remote and terrible God, and this is blended with Lucretian atomism, and Fontenelle’s plurality of worlds; with the deism of the Essay on Man and the cosmology of Night Thoughts; with the pre-Adamites of Vathek and with Buffon’s giants and “organic degeneration”; with the spontaneous generation of Erasmus Darwin; and finally with the catastrophism of Cuvier’, M.K. Joseph, Byron the Poet (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), p. 121. For Byron’s ‘manic depression’, see Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993), pp. 150–90. 19. See especially Chapter 3, ‘Harold in Italy: The Politics of Classical History’, in Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). 20. Frederick Garber offers an extended reading of the significance of the epigraph, in Byron: Self, Text, and Romantic Irony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 3–6. Notes 201 21. J.J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968), p. 249. 22. ‘[H]e fought shy of all optimistic, evolutionary theories of history, and his sceptical mind naturally found Cuvier’s ideas most congenial. In the mystery plays [Cain and Heaven and Earth] Byron chose to use Cuvier as a guide to more ancient patterns of historical thought, and he sets out a regressive theory of history to usher in the necessary millennial event. Cuvier’s theories appealed to Byron because they asserted a series of cata- clysms in which the earth proceeded from her Golden Age, her youth, to her less and less splendid periods’, McGann, Fiery Dust, p.