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’.