Jane Stabler

The Artistry of Exile

and

‘What Constitutes a Reader?’ Don Juan and the Changing Reception of Romantic Form

‘Byron’s poetry is the most striking example I know in literary history of the creative role which poetic form can play’, Auden wrote in ‘The Shield of Perseus’.1 The question of what role, exactly, Byron’s ironically hailed ‘gentle reader’ plays in the reception of poetic form has been approached in a number of ways since the Romantic period. There have been studies of the economics and politics of reception and close analysis of various scenes of reception such as Lucy Newlyn’s examination of Romantic poets’ responses to hearing each other’s work.2 On a different front, profiles of the wider reading public have been constructed through analyses of guides and educational books to see how the ideal reader was envisaged while other scholars have traced the aesthetic horizons of the different groups that make up a readership, for example, women, children and working-class readers. Since Jon P. Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (1987), and Lee Erickson’s The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (2000), particular attention has been paid to the shaping of readerly taste through the direction of the reviewers and editors. In diverse studies of the Romantic period, marginalia, literary table talk and memoirs have been scrutinised for what they can tell us of reactions to poems in the run up to, and immediate aftermath of, publication.

Byron’s World Of Zest

Byron’s attention to food anticipates the new formalist criticism of recent years by impelling the reader into pleasure in formal texture and applying the brakes of a historicist critique. While these two ways of reading are embedded in Byron’s poetry, the possibilities of an invigorated formalism have been considerably extended by critics such as Susan Wolfson and Richard Cronin.1 To a certain extent, I also follow Barbara Gelpi’s work on Shelley and her conviction that the conflicting ideologies which governed the Romantic period can only be addressed by a mixture of critical perspectives.2 Gelpi concentrates on various manifestations of maternity in Shelley’s writing, and the significance of the nursing mother for Byron is one of the topics of this essay although it will also consider other forms of feasting.

Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798

An enhanced sense of the dynamics of satire in the Romantic period may modify our understanding of the early reception of Lyrical Ballads. For a long time Lyrical Ballads was accepted uncritically as one of the originary texts of Romanticism. Readers followed William Hazlitt’s ‘sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry […] something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of Spring’.1 Hazlitt was, of course, looking back on the experiment of Lyrical Ballads with a desire to make its ‘breath’ part of the ‘spirit of the age’. But if we suspend, for a moment, Hazlitt’s narrative of vernal growth, it may be possible to reveal the equally characteristic relationship between the Lyrical Ballads and the mud-slinging of contemporary satire. Robert Mayo placed Lyrical Ballads firmly in its literary context in his 1954 article The Contemporaneity of Lyrical Ballads’.2 Mayo illustrated how in its movement towards ‘“nature”’ and ‘“simplicity”’ Lyrical Ballads followed ‘a new orthodoxy’ of late eighteenth-century poetry rather than creating an entirely fresh poetic mode.3 Mayo’s article does not identify satire among the other ‘way-worn paths’ used by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but many of the characteristics of the volume he mentions (‘heterogeneity’, ‘unevenness’, ‘miscellaneousness’, ‘the sense of particularity’) are generic to satire.4

Against their Better Selves: Byron, Jeffrey and the Edinburgh

The relationship between Byron and Jeffrey got off to a monumentally bad start when Byron believed that Jeffrey had been the author of the attack on Hours of Idleness which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in January 1808. The actual reviewer, Henry Brougham, dismissed Byron’s first published volume as ‘so much stagnant water’, mercilessly exposing the way in which ‘the noble author is peculiarly forward in pleading minority’:1 It is a sort of privilege of poets to be egotists; but they should ‘use it as not abusing it;’ and particularly one who piques himself (though indeed at the ripe age of nineteen), of being ‘an infant bard,’ … should either not know, or should seem not to know, so much about his own ancestry.2

Taking Liberties: The Italian Picturesque in Women's Travel Writing

AT TWO critical moments in Mary Wollstonecraft’s gothic feminist novel Maria (1798), her heroine invokes the picturesque. When Maria returns to her native village, she enjoys ‘‘the picturesque form of several favourite trees, and the porches of rude cottages, with their smiling hedges’’ (113); a little later, having taken off her wedding ring and announced her intention to leave Venables, she opens the window of her locked room and revels in the sensation that she