The Byron Society presents a lecture by Prof Greg Kucich (University of Notre Dame).

This talk considers the ‘Trans-Mediterranean’ contexts of Byron’s life and writings in relation to the riveting correspondence between the geopolitics of his time and our own.  The term ‘Trans-Mediterranean’ derives from an ongoing Byron Project initiated by Jeffrey Cox and Greg Kucich with a bicentennial Symposium in Rome (2024), featuring a cluster of world-renowned Byron scholars, on the topic of Byron’s literary and biographical engagements with the multitudinous cultures of the Mediterranean region.  Inspired by what the eminent scholar Marilyn Butler has designated as Romanticism’s ‘Cult of the South’, Byron drew on his extensive lived and literary experiences of the widely varied inflections of the Mediterranean ‘South’ to formulate in his poetry a transformative and liberatory embrace of racial, ethnic, national, and religious hybridity—a fluid identity and poetic consciousness most vibrantly manifested in the so-called Turkish tales, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Don Juan.  This presentation will track the Byron Project’s developing take on the high contemporary relevance of such personal and poetical hybridity from its 2024 Byron Rome Symposium (which featured a rousing event at the Keats-Shelley House), through a special journal issue of Studies in Romanticism, and toward a forthcoming book collection of scholarly essays.  Attention will centre in this talk on Byron’s positioning of cultural hybridity against the post-Waterloo restorations of monarchial power and reactionary government throughout Europe and the keen messages of that confrontation for our own ‘tempestuous day’.

With Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, the man Byron had idolized since his youth meets an inglorious end, and with him, Byron’s hopes for a new age. He laments: ‘I am utterly bewildered and confounded’! After such disappointment, how does Byron view his fallen hero?

In ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’ (1814), Byron summons a cast of characters from history, mythology, fact and fable, searching for some counterpart for Napoleon who can ‘dazzle and dismay’, and represent both the best and worst of humanity. ‘Weigh’d in the balance’, Byron writes, ‘hero dust is vile as vulgar clay’. This paper goes through the Ode, introducing Byron’s dramatis personae and discussing what they reveal about Byron’s imagination.

In a final twist, however, less than a year since the Ode, Napoleon escapes from exile in a sensational return to power. As he looms over Europe again, how will Byron’s characterizations hold up?

‘I have a thorough aversion to his character and a very moderate admiration of his genius; he is great in so little a way’ (Charles Lamb to Joseph Cottle, May 26^th 1820). Lamb’s takedown of Byron seems uncompromising, but what can we gain from putting the two authors in conversation? In this lecture, co-hosted with the Charles Lamb Society, Matthew Ward will tackle the prickly question of variance. His lecture will think both about textual variants, and about the potentially differing views of archival material offered by Byron and Lamb. What does each writer make of or feel about manuscripts, and what are we to make of theirs? In what ways are Byron and Lamb at variance with each other? And how might those apparent differences lead to or reveal a strange sort of resemblance or likeness in their writing?

The theme of the 2027 Newstead Conference is Byron and Identity. The conference will take place at Newstead Abbey, from 23–24 April 2027, and will include a dinner on the evening of the 23rd and a tour of Newstead Abbey or its Gardens on the 24th.

The keynote will be delivered by Dr Gerard McKeever, titled ‘Borrowing Byron from the Library’

‘Changeable too, yet somehow “Idem semper”’ (Don Juan, XVII.11). The concept of identity suggests stability, lasting self-sameness. And yet, Byron’s proclamation of being ‘idem semper’—‘always the same’—somehow includes changeability. Byron’s version of the Ship of Theseus paradox points to a problem at the heart of the idea of identity: how can something, or someone, stay the same if everything is in flux? Identity’s supposed elimination of differences is further complicated by its fragmentation into various, at times competing, forms, which are seldom stable: comprising personal and professional constructions, as well as questions of nationality, sexuality, political leanings and authorial style, identity invoked mutability in Byron’s own times no less than in ours. The chameleonic poet was intimately aware of the innate mutability of identity, playfully shaping and reshaping his personal and poetic identities as he engaged with (and disengaged from) different audiences. This ‘mobilité’, to use a Byronic term, perhaps lies at the heart of his enduring popularity—yet it also forms the crux of many attacks against Byron and his works by past and present critics.

‘Byron and Identity’ CFP coming soon

We will also be offering two student travel bursaries available. Further details are available on the call for papers page (link above).

Conference details

Programme details will be available shortly

Transport during the conference

We will provide buses to:

• Travel Lodge, from Newstead Abbey
• Newstead Abbey, from Travel Lodge
• Portland College, from Newstead Abbey
• Travel Lodge, from Portland College
• Newstead Abbey, from Travel Lodge

Registration will be open in 2027