palgrave advances in byron studies Palgrave Advances Titles include: John Bowen and Robert L. Patten (editors) CHARLES DICKENS STUDIES Phillip Mallett (editor) THOMAS HARDY STUDIES Lois Oppenheim (editor) SAMUEL BECKETT STUDIES Jean-Michel Rabaté (editor) JAMES JOYCE STUDIES Peter Rawlings (editor) HENRY JAMES STUDIES Frederick S. Roden (editor) OSCAR WILDE STUDIES Jane Stabler (editor) BYRON STUDIES Nicholas Williams (editor) WILLIAM BLAKE STUDIES Forthcoming: Larry Scanlon (editor) CHAUCER STUDIES Anna Snaith (editor) VIRGINIA WOOLF STUDIES Suzanne Trill (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S WRITING Palgrave Advances Series Standing Order ISBN 978-1-4039-3512-2 (Hardback) 978-1-4036-3513-7 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in the case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England palgrave advances in byron studies edited by jane stabler university of st andrews Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jane Stabler 2007 Chapters © their authors 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-4592-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St Martin’s Press LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-4039-4593-8 ISBN 978-0-230-20610-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230206106 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palgrave advances in Byron studies / edited by Jane Stabler. p. cm –– (Palgrave advances) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788–1824––Criticism and interpretation. I. Stabler, Jane. PR4388.P35 2007 821'.7––dc22 2007060014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 contents notes on contributors vii chronology x note on the texts/list of abbreviations xii introduction: reading byron now 1 jane stabler 1. byron and the choreography of queer desire 16 steven bruhm 2. byron and the politics of editing 34 peter cochran 3. byron and digression 60 paul m. curtis 4. byron and history 81 caroline franklin 5. byron and post-colonial criticism: the eastern tales 106 peter j. kitson 6. byron and twentieth-century popular culture 130 ghislaine mcdayter 7. byron’s manfred and ecocriticism 155 timothy morton 8. byron and psychoanalytic criticism: werner 171 pamela kao and david punter vi palgrave advances in byron studies 9. byron in theory and theatre land: finding the right address 191 michael simpson 10. byron and war: sketches of spain: love and war in childe harold’s pilgrimage 213 philip shaw 11. byron and intertextuality: laureate triumph in childe harold iv: staël, hemans, hobhouse, byron 234 nanora sweet 12. don juan and the shiftings of gender 257 susan j. wolfson index 281 notes on contributors Steven Bruhm is Professor of English in the Department of English at Mount St Vincent University, Halifax. His books include Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (1994), Reflecting Narcissus. A Queer Aesthetic (2000) and Curiouser: on the Queerness of Children (2004). He is working on a study of the Gothic Child. Peter Cochran is the editor of the Newstead Byron Society Review. He has lectured on Byron in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Newstead, Glasgow, Liverpool, Versailles, Moncton, Gdansk, Salzburg, Yerevan and New York, and published numerous articles on the poet. He is author of the Byron entry in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and of the entries on J.C. Hobhouse and E.J. Trelawny for the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Paul M. Curtis teaches English Language and Literature at l’Université de Moncton and has published several articles on Byron, digression and wordplay. He has also edited the volume of Selected Proceedings from the 30th International Byron Conference, Byron and the Romantic Sublime (2005). Caroline Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Wales, Swansea. Her books include Byron’s Heroines (1992), Byron, A Literary Life (2000) and Mary Wollstonecraft, A Literary Life (2004). At present she is editing Women’s Travel Writing, 1750–1850, forthcoming from Routledge. She-Ru Kao (also known as Pamela Kao) has recently received her PhD from the University of Bristol. Her research explores the depth and vii viii palgrave advances in byron studies complexity of Byron’s dramatic characterization with the help of Freudian psychoanalysis and investigates Byron’s anticipation of some Freudian joke techniques in Don Juan. Peter J. Kitson is Professor of English at the University of Dundee. He has published widely in the field of Romantic period literature. Recently he has published (with Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee) Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004) and Romantic Literature, Race and Colonial Encounter, 1770–1830 (Palgrave USA) is forthcoming in 2007. Ghislaine McDayter is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Bucknell University. She has written extensively on the early generation of Romantic poets, and has edited two collections on Romanticism. She is currently completing her book, Convulsions in Rhyme: Byron and the Birth of Celebrity. Timothy Morton is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard, forthcoming), The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge, 2000), and Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge, 1994). David Punter is Professor of English and Research Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol. He has published books, articles and essays on the Gothic, romanticism, literary theory, psychoanalysis and the post-colonial, including an essay on Byron’s Don Juan. His most recent book is Postmodernism and Contemporary Writing (2005), and he has three further books forthcoming: Modernity, Metaphor, and Rapture. Philip Shaw is Reader in English Literature at the University of Leicester. His Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination was published by Palgrave in 2002 and his volume on the Sublime, for Routledge’s New Critical Idiom, appeared in 2006. He is currently working on a project dealing with rep- resentations of war in Romantic and Victorian literature and art. Michael Simpson is Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. In addition to his work on Romantic drama, theatre, literature and criticism, he is currently completing a co-authored study of post-colonial drama notes on contributors ix titled Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone and Dramas of the African Diaspora (Oxford, forthcoming). He has also begun a study of Romantic distraction, which he hopes to finish one day. Jane Stabler is Reader in Romanticism at the School of English, University of St Andrews. Her books include the Longman Byron Critical Reader (1998) and Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge, 2002). She is working on a study of the way the poetic conversations of the Byron-Shelley circle influenced the next generation of English poets in Italy. Nanora Sweet teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-St Louis. She co-edited Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2001) and publishes widely on Hemans’s early work. Her poetry chapbook Rotogravure has just appeared, and her Hemans and the Shaping of History is in progress. Susan J. Wolfson is Professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of several essays on Byron and other subjects in the age of Romanticism. Her article here is adapted from a chapter in her most recent book, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (2006). chronology 1788 22 January, Born at Cavendish Square, London 1789 Mrs Byron takes Byron to Aberdeen 1791 Death of Byron’s father in France