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  • The Gothic Byron
  • Anna Camilleri
The Gothic Byron. Edited by Peter Cochran. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Pp. 201. ISBN 978 1 4438 0244 4. £39.99.

In The Gothic Byron, Peter Cochran draws together a selection of essays originally given as papers at a one-day Byron conference, 'Byron and the Gothic'. These ten essays are bookended by Cochran's exhaustive introductory section on Byron's reading and rewriting of the Gothic, and a short concluding piece on the impact of ottava rima on what emerges throughout the book as a peculiarly Byronic Gothic. Cochran's hands-on editorial style is manifest, with around half of the book's 201 pages comprised of his own material. In a typically Cochran-esque blend of encyclopaedic knowledge and polemic discourse, Cochran's lengthy introduction attempts to flesh out the spectral presence of major Gothic works of the period alluded to in the papers themselves. In doing so, Cochran draws the veil from one particularly problematic skeleton in the cupboard - that the book is a selection of conference proceedings, rather than a collection of critical essays. As a selection of conference proceedings, however, The Gothic Byron is excellent: through a range of methodological approaches, the essays both anticipate and contribute to critical debate concerning Byron's engagement with the Gothic.

Bernard Beatty opens the collection by examining 'The Machinery of Faux Catholicism'. Beatty illustrates the connections Byron makes throughout his poetry between Gothic writing, Catholic 'systems' and epic machinery. Characteristically wide-ranging, Beatty intelligently argues that in an age that refuted the possibility of supernatural agency being able to 'make anything extraordinary actually happen', writers were forced to find an alternative mode of [End Page 69] constructing suspenseful plots. Aligning Byron with Scott, Beatty is also careful to point out that Byron is not a Gothic writer, though he uses the Gothic.

In 'Byron's Bones - Necrophiliac Leanings of the Poet', Ralph Lloyd-Jones presents us with a rather more explicitly Gothic Byron. Using the verses written by Byron to be engraved on the infamous Skull Cup, the essay argues for the significance of the poet's 'interest in human remains and their symbolism' for a proper understanding of the Gothic Byron. This morbid taste is not, however, characterised by a dark vein of sexual deviance as his title may suggest, but something rather more literary. In the first of several essays to refer to Hamlet, Lloyd-Jones emphasises Byron's Shakespearean heritage before asserting Byron's preferred allegiance to the medievalism of nineteenth-century Gothic over neo-classical Romanticism.

Monika Coghen's essay, 'Gothic in Byron's Dramas', also sees Byron's commitment to the Gothic as poised uncomfortably alongside his neo-classical leanings. For Coghen, Werner is testimony to Byron's 'need to abandon the restraints of classical unities which he had earlier advocated'. Coghen regards the play as demonstrative of the poet's conception 'of drama in terms of the Gothic appetites of the early nineteenth-century stage'. One of the more convincing parallels Coghen draws is between Sardanapalus' dream in the fourth act of Byron's late play and 'Monk' Lewis's grotesque description of the spectral fiancée in The Castle Spectre, written in 1796 and first performed at Drury Lane in 1797, though her focus on the theatrical prevents her from observing a further probable textual parallel with Victor's nightmare in the fifth chapter of Frankenstein.

Mirka Horova's 'Gothic in Don Juan' provides a more nuanced approach to the Gothic by differentiating between sensations of Terror and Horror. Using extracts from Radcliffe's On the Supernatural in Poetry (1826) and its major influence, Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), Horova connects the Gothic Byron with eighteenth-century concepts of the Sublime. Horova's essay makes a strong case for reading Byron's depiction of the Siege of Ismail in the eighth canto of Don Juan as a Gothic episode, before focussing on the Norman Abbey cantos, which a majority of contributors to the volume see as integral to any contemplation of the genre.

In perhaps the finest essay...

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