When Byron published the first two cantos of Don Juan in 1819 the first readers of the poem did not know what to make of it. It was a poem that they had to learn how to read. In exploring this claim, Prof Richard Cronin (University of Glasgow) will make another, much larger claim: the strategies Byron’s readers had to develop to understand this strange new poem were then applied to other works, as well. By the time Byron died, his readers were opening their copies of Chaucer or Shakespeare and were surprised to find that they seemed to be reading Byronic poets. Learning to read Don Juan had changed the way that they understood the whole history of English literature. Cronin suggests that Byron’s poem retains that power. In his talk, he will detail how after immersing himself in Don Juan for three or four years in order to write a book on that poem, he was surprised to find himself returning to Jane Austen and reading her very differently. ‘Jane Austen and Byron knew each other’s work but Jane Austen never had the opportunity to read Don Juan’, Cronin says. ‘Nevertheless it was the poem that Jane Austen never read, I now recognize, that had changed the way that I was reading her novels.’ In his talk, Prof Cronin will ask what that tells us about Jane Austen, and what it tells us about Byron.