ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#16 | May 13, 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036
This conference will examine Byron’s engagement with politics in the widest sense: as a poet, as a member of the House of Lords, as a commentator on his time, and latterly as a would-be revolutionary.
Academic sessions might include:
- Byron and the politics of culture
- Political style in Byron’s writing
- Byron and the politics of the ‘Other’
- Byron and the politics of emergent nations (Italy, Greece, the Americas)
- Byron and the House of Lords
- Byron and Napoleon
- Byron as social satirist
- Byron and revolution
- Byron as liberal and/or libertine
- Byron and religion
- Byron and social class
- Byron and gender/sexual politics
- Byron and British political parties
- Byron and imperialism
- Byron and celebrity
- Byron’s posthumous political influence
- The ‘Byron legend’ (construction and/or appropriation)
- ‘Words and things’ (literature versus action in Byron’s life and work)
Proposals for papers on these and other aspects of Byron and politics, or the politics of Byron’s poetry, are welcome. Please send 250-word proposals by 28 February 2013 to byron.conference@kcl.ac.uk.
Individual presentations must not exceed 20 minutes in length. In order to accommodate the maximum number of presentations in the programme, the organisers hope to include one or more ‘round-table’ discussions around specific themes. Individual contributions to these discussions would typically be of 5-10 minutes. If you would be willing for your proposal to be included in a ‘round-table’ session, please indicate this when you send it. Ready-formed proposals for such sessions, based on a particular theme, timed to last either 90 or 120 minutes, and including a minimum of 4 speakers, will be particularly welcome.
Please note that you should normally be a current member of a national Byron Society in order to present a paper at the conference. For a list of Byron societies worldwide see www.internationalbyronsociety.org
Bursaries for student presenters
Limited funds are available to help selected students meet the cost of presenting a paper at the conference (either as individual speakers or as Round Table participants). If you wish to be considered for one of these, please indicate this clearly in your proposal. Applicants will be contacted in late March and can expect to know the decision of the Academic Committee by mid-April 2013.
Academic committee
- Roderick Beaton (King’s College London)
- Bernard Beatty (University of Liverpool)
- Peter Graham (Virginia Tech)
- Christine Kenyon Jones (King’s College London)
- Alan Rawes (University of Manchester)
- Jane Stabler (University of St Andrews)