Byron: Heritage and Legacy

BYRON: HERITAGE AND LEGACY. Edited by Cheryl A. Wilson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. xiii + 262. ISBN 978 0 230 60029. $74. 95. Byron: Heritage and Legacy contains selected papers from the 2001 International Byron Society conference. One of the largest, longest and most ambitious in the history of the IBS, the conference was held at venues in the Boston area, New York City and in Newark, Delaware. The editor includes at the back of the volume the rigorous day-by-day, hour-by-hour conference schedule, along with the full academic programme. Participants - themselves from countries all over the globe - had a hectic, exciting time of it. In New York, conference delegates lodged at the Millennial Hotel opposite the Twin Towers. Five weeks after the conference ended, as the world watched, an inferno engulfed the Towers, the hotel and much else in the adjacent city blocks. The immense devastation left nearly three thousand dead and remains a festering wound in the American political and cultural consciousness. Contributors to this volume were asked to reflect both on the conference and on the monstrous tragedy that soon followed, and some did. The book thus memorialises an epoch in America's history as well as the achievement of a scholarly gathering. Of the thirty-nine conference papers, Byron: Heritage and Legacy includes eighteen, about half-a-dozen of which have since been published elsewhere. In the introduction, Bernard Beatty reminds us that Byron today, as in his lifetime, has international stature and appeals to varied interests. The collection is divided into three parts, the first on Byron's international reception, the second on influences on his work and the third on his literary inheritors. Several of the countries discussed in Part 1 are among the least studied in regard to Byron's international reputation. Nora Liassis describes how, in a recent scandal involving Cypriot mosaics pilfered for the global antiquities trade, the judge bolstered a key legal opinion by citing Byron's The Siege of Corinth. Tracy Ware, focusing primarily on George Longmore's The Charivari (1824), illuminates Byron's influence on early Canadian literature. Paul Curtis discusses how he teaches Byron in New Brunswick, one of Canada's bilingual provinces, once under attack by the poet's 'tempest-tost' grandfather, Admiral John 'Foulweather Jack' Byron. With Manfred as the major text, Ludmilla Kostova probes the complex response to Byron in Bulgaria in the four decades after Ottoman control ceased in 1878. Miroslawa Modrzewska, reassessing the Byron legend in Poland, observes that what counted was 'the Promethean and Tyrtean elements', the 'presentation of Byron as a Poet-Soldier'. Peter Accardo offers a brief overview of Byron's American fame, a subject he has dealt with more extensively elsewhere. Part 2 begins with Marilyn Gaull's engagingly titled 'Byron and the Dragons of Eden'. Wide-ranging and informative, this takes up the impact on Byron - via Balzac, Shelley and Mary Shelley - of Cuvier's catastrophic geology. Catastrophism (Gaull cites W. J. T. Mitchell) 'expressed the unconscious and political fear of impending disaster and personal extinction'. Wolf Z. Hirst's savvy essay on the biblical heritage in Byron's Cain points out how Byron viewed the obligations involved in brotherhood. Such an ideal of human fellowship finds apt response, via Schiller on the need for Bruderschaft, in Beethoven's Cantata on the Death of Joseph II, Fidelio and the Ninth Symphony. …

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