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  • Don Juan: Conception, Reception, Imitation’ The Byron Society Conference, Nottingham 7 December 2019
  • Francesco Marchionni (bio)

In affiliation with Romantic Bicentennials and the British Association of Romantic Studies, The Byron Society gathered scholars from the UK, Europe and USA at the ‘Don Juan: Conception, Reception, Imitation’ conference, held at the Antenna Media Centre in Nottingham, to commemorate the bicentenary of the publication of Cantos I and II of Byron’s Don Juan.

The opening panel of the conference, chaired by Christine Kenyon Jones (King’s College London), included papers by Roderick Beaton (King’s College London), William Davis (Colorado College), Peter Graham (Virginia Tech), and John Havard (New York State). Beaton’s ‘Don Juan and Homer’s Odyssey’ offered a compelling reading of the influence of the Greek world as a cultural and literary paradigm of Byronic imagination in Don Juan. Davis’s paper ‘“O Plato! Plato”: Don Juan versus the Philosophers’ discussed Byron’s resistance to the Greek philosophical tradition of Platonic idealism, to sustain, instead, a view of the world as fractured between the real and the ideal. Graham’s ‘Julia’s Letter’ argued that Julia’s letter in Canto I shifts the meditation about love and other emotions from the personal to the universal to convey a reflection on womanhood and social constraint. Havard’s closing paper, ‘Don Juan in and out of Context: Byron, Hobhouse, and the Politics of Publishing Cantos I and II’, underpinned Hobhouse’s contradictory motives to publish Don Juan, fearing possible accusations of libel, because, as Havard argued, Don Juan was intended as an attack on the Tory government of Regency England.

Chaired by Peter Graham, the first panel was followed by the keynote lecture ‘Byron and his Language’ by the legendary Jerome McGann (Virginia and California, Berkeley). McGann’s keynote focused on the use of vernacular language in Byron’s work to challenge the Romantic notion of poetic language to follow a linguistic system. Byron, as McGann argued, thought that English in poetry did not need enterprise, rather it should be set free – a position that for McGann testified to the absence of linguistic predicaments in the language of Byron’s poetry. Looking at Canto X of Don Juan, McGann offered a primary example of the multiple façades of Byronic language. The language of Canto X, for instance, can be read as performative, inasmuch as its nature resembles the traits of a poem to be read out loud; or, the use of the ottava rima can be seen as a pattern of dissimulation between fiction and contradictions. McGann’s [End Page 73] keynote also looked at the complexities of Byron’s vernacular language in translating from the Italian and Latin. McGann demonstrated, for example, Byron’s linguistic ability to translate Italian into vernacular English in stanza 8 of Canto I. Equally, McGann illuminated Byron’s repeated use of similes in his work, because, unlike metaphors, the language of similes is capable of drawing out distinctions; although, as McGann argued, the similes of stanzas 9 and 10 in Canto XVI reach an impasse.

With everyone refreshed after the lunch break, the third session ensued, divided into two parallel panels. Panel A, chaired by Mirka Horova (Charles, Prague), opened with Jake Phipps’s (Durham) engaging comparative paper, ‘The Art of Easy Writing’: Satire and Celebrity in Burns and Byron’, presenting various examples of both poets’ use of satire, and levity in general, in relation to the notion of celebrity. The indefatigable conference organiser, Emily Paterson-Morgan (Byron Society), followed with her captivating analysis of the contemporary culture of adultery trials and the ways in which this influenced the Julia episode, in her paper titled ‘What shall I do about Ph and her epistles’: The Adulterous Love Letter in Don Juan I, 192–198’. The session closed with an erudite reading of contemporary legal intricacies and their reflections in Don Juan, presented by Fiona Milne (York) in her paper ‘Don Juan, the Law and Byronic Self-defence’, which complemented the preceding two papers rather well, sparking interesting discussion.

Panel B, chaired by Gregory Dowling (Ca’ Foscari), started with David Wood-house’s (Byron Society) paper ‘The Conception of Don Juan: Lakers, Cockneys and...

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