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  • Editorial
  • Alan Rawes

2009 will have been a busy year for many Byronists. May saw the annual Nottingham Trent one-day conference on 'Byron and Women (and Men)', then in July the 'Byron, Pushkin and Russia' conference took place in Moscow and Mikhailovskoye. September saw the International Byron Society conference in Athens and Messolonghi, and the splendid Byron event in Albania. In December we have the second annual Byron Centre conference in Manchester, on 'Byron and the Politics of Continental Europe'. The Nottingham, Russian and Albanian events are reported in this issue of the journal, while full reports of the Greek and Manchester conferences will follow in the first issue for 2010.

Lots of exciting things have been happening lately on paper, too – so many, in fact, that the International Byron Society has this year decided to award its prize for the best recent work on Byron, the Elma Dangerfield Prize, to two outstanding scholarly books rather than one: Tom Mole's Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Palgrave, 2007) and Ghislaine McDayter's Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (SUNY Press, 2009).

In putting together the present run of essays, the journal has aimed, as always, for a varied, representative sample of the scholarly work currently being done on Byron and Byron-related topics. And there is plenty of variety out there to be represented. Here we have essays on Byronic ekstasis, the hints of Byron's spoken voice embedded in his verse, Byron's handwritten annotations to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, the prolonged battle to get Byron commemorated in Poets' Corner and Caroline Lamb's editing of Glenarvon. The last of these also details a new discovery – a copy of Lamb's novel with copious handwritten revisions by the author in the Dutch Royal Library in The Hague.

Another full programme of Byron events is promised for next year, with conferences on 'Byron's Religion' (Nottingham), 'Byron and the Book' (Boston) and 'Byron and Burns' (Manchester) already on the horizon. We'll keep you posted. [End Page v]

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