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The European Byron

Mobility, Cosmopolitanism, and Chameleon Poetry

Jonathan Gross author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Anthem Press

Publishing:16th Sep '25

£80.00

This title is due to be published on 16th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

The European Byron cover

Explores Byron’s borrowings from Thomas Moore, Torquato Tasso, Percy Shelley, and so on, and transformations as they manifested themselves in his reading. 

This book considers Byron’s borrowings from Thomas Moore, Tasso, Percy Shelley, Ugo Foscolo, and Madame de Stael. The conclusion considers how Byron’s ironic mode in politics in Greece influenced Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, encouraging other authors to imitate him, as he had imitated others.

Byron concealed himself in various literary disguises, a process he called “mobility.” In this study of influences on Byron’s verse and Byron’s European impact, I explore these borrowings and transformations as they manifested themselves in his reading.  At issue is the very concept of romantic poetic voice. Framing himself in the tradition of the Irish yet cosmopolitan Thomas Moore, Byron adopted continental guises, imitating both Italian writers and political heroes, such as Dante, Machiavelli, and Tasso.  In establishing an Italian identity, Byron relied upon  the Italian writers he translated (Pulci, Dante), Thomas Moore’s “Fudge Family in Paris,” and Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo,” as well as Goethe’s Faust. This Europeanization of Byron should not conceal the fact that Byron adopted poses from his predecessors, such as Walter Scott, in order to fashion himself as a Scottish poet who also happened to be English. Byron became the writers he read: Moore, Shelley, Wordsworth, Scott, Foscolo, Lady Morgan, and Madame de Stael.  Those who imitated Byron, particularly Alexander Pushkin and Adam Mickiewicz, became the best interpreters of his literary example, and explained what it meant to be a Harold in Muscovite Cloak, or a Polish Byron, to be both delimited and emancipated by Byron’s example.

ISBN: 9781839991424

Dimensions: 229mm x 153mm x 23mm

Weight: 454g

250 pages