Lord Byron: Lives and Afterlives
Presiding, Cheryl F. Giuliano, University of California, Los Angeles.

Byron's Life as Collector and his Pursuit of an Epic Voice

Byron collected books, animals, women, cities, experiences. I focus on his collecting of Napoleona, that is, objects associated with Napoleon. In an article in the 1997 Byron Journal I took up his collecting of books by or about Napoleon; another in an essay in a 1999 volume examined how his reading of Las Cases's Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène influenced the strategy of his Greek campaign. I have since focused on other aspects of his Napoleonic collecting, his carriage (an exact replica of Napoleon's), his Waterloo relics (all French), his gold Napoleons, his Napoleonic snuffboxes, and others. Byron, be it noted, collected objects of no other figure. The MLA paper will explore how the objects Byron collected influenced the way he lived his life and the poetry he wrote as a consequence. For example, after having an exact replica of Napoleon's carriage made, Byron traveled about absolutist Europe in it as a witness to what he believed were Napoleonic ideals of freedom. Byron's collection of Napoleona, like the carriage, intensified his desire to model his life on Napoleon's. Imitating Napoleon's life ultimately led Byron both to write his epic, Don Juan and to undertake his heroic deeds on behalf of Greek independence. As no others in his life, these two achievements secured for Byron his lasting after-fame. Besides my own, there is no scholarly work on this subject, no book, no articles, only odd mentions of various items he collected in publications designed for collectors.

John Clubbe
University of Kentucky

Byron in the Nineteenth-Century Pantheon

The paper I will give at the convention adds a new dimension to discussions of Byron's reception in nineteenth-century Britain. Studies of his posthumous reception (most notably by Andrew Elfenbein and Samuel Chew) have focused on Byron's textual afterlives, but his posthumous reception also depended on a number of non-textual artifacts. This paper will focus on one such artifact: the bronze statue by Richard Charles Belt erected in Hyde Park in 1880. I will examine the debates surrounding this monument, the semiotics of the statue itself, and the significance of the site chosen for it. I will situate the statue in the context of the Reform agitation, suggesting that it formed part of an emerging, secular, liberal pantheon which helped to build new forms of consensus in the reformed nation. Statues were a key element in Byron's posthumous reception, and paying attention to them reveals the strategies employed by those who took it as their duty to preserve Byron's fame, the understanding of Byron that they hoped to bequeath to modernity, and the things they would have preferred us to forget.

Tom Mole
McGill University, Montreal

Lord Byron: Vampire

Lord Byron was famously used as the model for Lord Ruthven in Polidori's The Vampyre, itself a variation on Byron's own fragmentary vampire tale, both originating in the famous ghost story competition that also gave rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The recent popular fascination with vampires, combined with a shift in their perception from ruthless predators to tormented, demonic, but, ultimately, sympathetic villains, or frequently even heroes, of Anne Rice, Twilight, and television's Angel to name a few, means that the vampire of contemporary popular fiction now resembles nothing more than the Byronic hero. In his 1995 novel, Lord of the Dead, Tom Holland casts Byron as a vampire, using biographical details to solid effect, while 2009's Jane Bites Back, by Michael Thomas Ford, satirizes the contemporary cults of both Jane Austen and the vampire by casting Austen as a blood-drinking bookstore owner and a gleefully persistent Byron as the vampire who turned her. A reading of these texts, alongside Byron's public persona and his own Manfred, will show that Byron, and the Byronic hero, lie at the core of the new vampire, displacing both Ruthven and Dracula.

Catherine Siemann
The Cooper Union

Carl Woodring and the Rise of New Historicism
Presiding: Jonathan Gross (DePaul University)

Session Description:

This session, Carl Woodring and the Rise of the New Historicism, honors the work of Carl Woodring, whose exemplary life serves as the occasion for commentary by three of his most distinguished students: Anne Mellor, Nina Auerbach, and Steven Jones. "We remember him for his unassuming demeanor and Coleridgean mind," Hermione De Almeida writes in a forthcoming obituary for the Keats-Shelley Journal, "for his scrupulous honesty and respect for facts, for his lightly-worn professionalism and deep human decency, for his understated humor and surprising irony, and for his ranging conversations that always generously presumed that we knew as much as he did."

Carl Woodring received his PhD from Harvard and taught at the University of Wisconsin (1948-61) and Columbia University (1961-88), where he served as chair from 1968-1971. He became the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature at Columbia in 1976, and retained the chair as professor of literature emeritus when he retired in 1988. During his career at Columbia he served on the Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities as Chairman and Co-Chairman. Carl's scholarly awards are numerous, ranging from the Bowdoin prize at Harvard (1947), a Ford Foundation grant for 1955-56 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1958-59. In 1986 he received Rice University's Distinguished Alumnus award. Carl wrote numerous articles and books including "Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge" (1961), "Wordsworth" (1965), and "Nature into Art: Cultural Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (1989), He edited the two volumes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Table Talk (for the Bollingen Series "Collected Coleridge: in 1990) and co-edited "The Columbia History of British Poetry" (1995). His 1970 book on William Wordsworth, "Politics in English Romantic Poetry," won the Phi Beta Kappa award. His "Literature: an Endangered Profession" (published Columbia University Press in 1999) won the Texas Writers League Violet Crown Award.

Woodring's life ranges over a time when English departments experienced a time of unprecedented growth; perhaps his example can guide us at a time when English studies seem to be in danger of self-immolation. A beneficiary of the G.I. Bill, which Woodring called . "the greatest contribution to higher education since Diderot's encyclopedia," Woodring offered a perspective on remedies for higher education that have been regrettably ignored. Andrew Delbanco's omnibus review pointed out the strange allure of this doomsday genre, which includes Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature, In Plato's Cave, What's Happened to the Humanities?, Robert Scholes' The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline, John M. Ellis' Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities, Michael Berube's The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, and Robert Scholes' The Decline and Fall of English. Most recently, William Chase has written The Decline of the English Department for the September, 2009 issue of American Scholar. My introduction will allude to Delbanco and Chase's article and suggest how Woodring's Literature an Embattled Profession answers these works. Woodring's forty year career in higher education may well serve as a beacon as departments of English face troubled times.

Presider, Jonathan Gross, Director of the DePaul Humanities Center, and Professor of English, wrote the author biographies for Columbia History of Poetry (1995), ed. by James Shapiro and Carl Woodring. He edited Byron's :"Corbeau Blanc": The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne; Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire's Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment, The Sylph, and Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family, and Romantic Love. Gross will briefly survey Prof. Woodring's career, and the work of the panelists who studied with him.

1. "Carl Woodring, Tactful Truth-teller," by Nina Auerbach, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English. Universities have long been a favorite scapegoat in the culture wars, Nina Auerbach will argue in "Carl Woodring, Tactful Truth-teller," "ignorant ideologues on all sides have condemned us, diagnosed us, exhorted us. Only Carl Woodring is sane and informed about our actual ailments. His Literature: an Embattled Profession is a wise, woeful dirge for a falling ivory tower, written from within. His diagnosis is so sophisticated and true that ideologues of all stripes have felt free to ignore it." Auerbach has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship as well as the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Her works include the kind of popular work for a general audience that Carl Woodring inspired and championed: lucid, learned work written in accessible prose: Our Vampires, Ourselves; Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians; Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time; Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts; Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth; and Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Her most recent book, Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress inaugurates the University of Pennsylvania Press series and also shows Auerbach treating popular writings. Her current project is Lost Lives, a study of ghosts and their purposes.

2. "Politics and Prints in English Romantic Poetry" by Steven E. Jones, Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago.  His essay, "Politics and Prints in English Romantic Poetry" will show the importance of graphical satires as extra-literary indices to political and social context, "a field Carl Woodring's mentorship led me to explore," he writes. Woodring's historical approach, using popular forms such as the prints that often serve as illustrations for Woodring's Politics in English Romantic poetry, inspired a good deal of new historicism, much of which lacked his keen sense of what he called "the paradox of imaginative commitment to public affairs" (Politics, 7), his sensitivity to the Romantic poets' "continuing dilemma" as they faced "the dichotomy between political and aesthetic inclinations" (6). Steven E. Jones is author of Shelley's Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (Northern Illinois U P, 1994), Satire and Romanticism (St. Martin's, 2000), Against Technology: from the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (Routledge, 2006) and The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (Routledge, 2008). He's currently completing a book for MIT Press (co-authored with George K. Thiruvathukal), Codename Revolution: The NIntendo Wii Platform (forthcoming 2011).

3. "Engendering the Politics of English Romantic Poetry," by Anne K. Mellor, Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at UCLA. Carl Woodring's insistence that every poem is a political event shaped Anne Mellor's intellectual career, inspiring her to take gender as well as political ideology as all-important variables in the construction, interpretation and academic canonization of literary texts of the Romantic era. Her essay argues that his work initiated the move to a "new historicist" approach to Romanticism. "Even more important, his invariably tolerant, probing and supportive responses to the work of his students led me to understand the true meaning of "humane," in all its possible applications," Mellor writes. Anne K. Mellor is a Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at UCLA. Her scholarly interests focus on eighteenth and nineteenth century British literature, women's writing, feminist theory, and the visual arts. Her most recent book, Mothers of the Nation - Women's Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (2000), argues that women writers were instrumental in shaping public opinion during the Romantic era, the kind of argument that forms a leitmotif in Woodring's Politics in English Romantic Poetry. She is the author of Blake's Human Form Divine (1974), English Romantic Irony (1980), Mary Shelley: Her Fiction, Her Life, Her Monsters (1988) and Romanticism and Gender (1993). She edited the first collection of feminist essays on Romantic writing, Romanticism and Feminism (1988), and is the co-editor of an anthology of canon-transforming Romantic writing, British Literature 1780-1830, as well as of The Other Mary Shelley (1993) and Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility (2000). She is currently editing the first modern edition of Lucy Aikin's Epistles on Women for Broadview Press. In 1999 she received the Keats-Shelley Association Distinguished Scholar Award; she has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, three NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers Directorships, and ACLS, NEH, Rockefeller and Australian National University Fellowships in the Humanities. She received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002 and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the English Association in 2004.

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