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  • 'Byron and the Romantic World' Keele University 30 September 2016
  • Hannah Scragg

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Professor Drummond Bone, University of Oxford (The Old Library, Keele Hall).

On Friday 30 September 2016 Keele University hosted an undergraduate and postgraduate conference on Byron and Romanticism. Originally the event was hosted solely at Edge Hill University, under the nurturing command of Dr Mary Hurst, but last year the two institutions teamed up to develop this inaugural event which, though modelled closely on Dr Hurst's original vision, sought to nourish the existing relationship between the two institutions and develop a continued practice of collaboration. The event itself was designed by Keele and Edge Hill to encourage undergraduate and postgraduate students from a range of institutions to meet, present, and potentially collaborate on future Byron-related projects. The speakers varied in levels of study—from undergraduate to postgraduate. Accordingly, an event of this sort is quite rare in encouraging undergraduates from second year onwards to glimpse some of the [End Page 93] processes involved in postgraduate and academic circles, whilst enabling each speaker to hone their presentation and networking skills. The event took place in Keele Hall, the beautiful nineteenth-century mansion house at the centre of the campus, with the papers themselves being delivered in the intimate setting of the 'Old Library'.

The first panel kicked off with two conference veterans; Kimberley Braxton—a third year PhD student from Keele University—and Kirsty J. Harris—who has recently submitted her PhD thesis at Anglia Ruskin University. The celebrated Byronist Mr. Bernard Beatty was the chair. Both speakers presented passionate and stimulating papers. Braxton exposed the relationship between Byron's public 'Byronic' persona, and the influence of the Byronic hero on the subsequent writing practices of the Brontë siblings. She introduced some provocative distinctions between Emily Brontë's appropriations of the Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights (1847) and Branwell's experimentation with Byronic ideals in his personal life. Harris followed this paper by explicating ideas of metamorphosis in Byron's 'shipwreck' narrative in Canto II of Don Juan. In her paper, Harris discussed Byron's apparent rejection of classical deities which were 'intrinsic to classical narratives' to, as she argued, develop the idea of human regeneration and a notion of heroism not dictated by the divine.

The next session was chaired by Edge Hill's entertaining Dr Andrew McInnes. Daniel Westwood (Sheffield) kicked off with a nuanced reading of monologues in Byron's Manfred (1817). He examined elements of monodrama and monologue in the play and interrogated the complexities that arose from 'a work that is both attuned to the power of the monological and willing to embrace open-endedness'. Westwood emphasised the ambiguity that such tensions may present, and sought to develop McGann's ideas on Byron's distinctions between lying and cant to show that neither label is quite appropriate for the level of ambivalence of the play. Two students from Edge Hill University completed the panel; both of them were in their second year of undergraduate study. Megan Carney gave a sophisticated examination of the role of the servant in nineteenth-century Gothic literature. She suggested that, through their unique role of simultaneously being and not-being, the agency of the servant is difficult to determine and, as a consequence, their presence can be compared to that of a ghost. Soraya Atherton was last but not least in this engaging panel. She formulated a discussion on exile in the nineteenth century. Her particular focus pinpointed the exile of the Shelleys to the continent in the early part of the century. Atherton made many probing comparisons between different forms of exile; she developed a strong distinction between the morose ideas of exile demonstrated in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and the more jubilant depictions of exile in the later cantos of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18).

After lunch, and a tour of the grounds, the final panel (chaired by myself) began with Rosie Jackson-Horn, an undergraduate student from Canterbury Christ Church University. Jackson-Horn argued that Byron's identity was 'self-fashioned', and that he strove to develop his identity as a brooding anti...

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