Byron and World Literature

Bibliographic Data

ID23478317
AuthorsClara Tuite (0000-0002-7896-6548, The University of Melbourne, corresponding author)
Year2024
Pages446-461
Publication date2024-10-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueOxford Handbook of Lord Byron (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808800.013.45
OpenAlexW4403634800
ISBN9780198808800
LanguageEN
References cited31

This essay considers how Byron’s life, work, and reception presides over the transformation of Enlightenment ideals of cosmopolitanism and worldliness into a form of global Romanticism that anticipates Goethe’s coinage ideal of Weltliteratur. A new regime of imperial global modernity provided the broader context for the emergence of world literature, which coincides with the reordering of Europe that followed the Napoleonic Wars. In this sense, Goethe’s ‘epoch’ of world literature is also the epoch in which capitalism and imperialism combined to form what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the modern ‘world-system’. A critical feature of the story of Byron and world literature is thus the history of a new commercially driven form of English imperialism that both collaborates with and gains ascendancy over the Habsburg empire after the Napoleonic Wars. This essay explores how Byron’s work straddles Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and Romantic world literature in part through a complex repurposing of Orientalism. It considers Byron’s distinctive form of global Romanticism in relation to this Enlightenment legacy, tracking how Byron transforms a lived experience and poetic practice of cosmopolitan citizenship of the world into a dynamic, immersive cross-cultural world literature that is also a strenuous satirical critique of the post-Napoleonic world-system and its new imperialisms.

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