Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror ed. by Matthew J. A. Green and Piya Pal-Lapinski (review)

In The Rhetoric of Terror, Marc Redfield notes the importance of the Romantic period for understanding our contemporary war on terror, reminding readers “the French Revolution and the opening of an era of human rights, mass politics, and biopolitical power” (p. 86) as well as Robespierre’s Terror and English reactions to it are all crucial moments for a genealogy of the present. Redfield’s argument is deeply convincing, yet he is primarily concerned with the 1790s and this is only one moment in which the almost always volatile Romantic period engaged with ideas of terror. Matthew J. A. Green and Piya Pal-Lapinski consider the degree to which concerns surrounding terror and freedom remain pressing concerns for the second generation Romantics. Byron is a rewardingly obvious and difficult choice for their interest in tracing Romanticism’s wider significance for thinking about “the immediate socio-political situation” of our own times (p. 7). It is obvious because of Byron’s expressed allegiance to Greek independence and of Mazeppa’s examination of torture, and it is challenging because of Byron’s perceived resistance to politics. Indeed, a great accomplishment of this collection is its attention to how “Byron’s representations of political, aesthetic, and erotic life throughout his work, as well as his fascination with the spectral or vampiric, directly engage this sort of conjunction between sovereignty, bare life, freedom, and terror” (p. 5).

The essays included here examine a great many of Byron’s key texts as well as lesser-read ones such as Cain and Prisoner of Chillon, all of them linked by a thematic interest in freedom and terror and related concerns around cultural memory, spectacle, violence, history, and colonialism. The essays tend to be either working with recent theoretical considerations of political terror, or working with legacies of Romantic scholarship. Green enlists several recent theoretical works in order to consider The Giaour’s intersections of violence, freedom, and community with that explicitly aesthetic form of terror, the Gothic. Reading Werner, Pal-Lapinski contends that terror must be understood in connection to desire, death, and capital. Joshua David Gonsalves examines the impact of a culture of terror that is transformed by Napoleon’s violence as much as by the guillotine. Taking exception to those who would assert Byron’s resistance to the political, he proposes “that Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari question the very possibility of politics in an era traumatized by” widespread and enduring terror (p. 51). Investigating similar texts, Ian Dennis turns instead to the psychic life of power to understand how desire, pleasure, and violence intersect. Young-ok An considers the limits of bourgeois individualism and examines a surprising congruence between freedom and terror in the character Manfred. Simon Bainbridge’s attention to the figure of Switzerland offers a compelling way of rethinking much of Byron’s work, particularly regarding the ways in which a poetics of freedom is given form and substance. Jane Stabler analyzes the intimacy and affective responses in a culture of terror by considering how Byron’s responses to public executions in Rome in 1820, importantly attending to the complex ways in which art can feed on such spectacles sometimes more than it records and suffers their presence. Stabler’s, one of the most powerful essays in the collection, confronts Byron’s often seductive amusement with the world, a seduction that is dangerous if it is not read alongside his denunciations of precisely that mode in other works. Stephen Minta offers tremendously engaging close readings of Byron’s reflections on political consistency in an essay that deserves to be included alongside key texts of Romantic apostasy. Tilottama Rajan’s essay, another highlight of the collection, examines Mary Shelley’s memory of her father as Byronic, a memory that inscribes an enduring deviance at the core of Romanticism. Rajan thus reframes Byron’s significance...