Lord Byron and the cosmopolitan imagination, 1795-1824
Date
2011
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Following George Gordon, Lord Byron across Britain, Europe, and the Eastern Mediterranean, "Lord Byron and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 1795-1824" traces Byron's cosmopolitanism to its foundations in Greek Cynical philosophy and to its founder, Diogenes, Byron's self-confessed mentor. The Cynics are commonly regarded as the first cosmopolitans; yet the cosmopolitanism they practiced is quite different from the cosmopolitanism we value today. Instead of stressing a need for social progress and global interconnectedness, the Cynics chose to live outside of society, challenging its conventions and declaring themselves to be citizens of the cosmos. I argue that Byron followed Cynical ideas closely and, as a Cynical cosmopolitan, rejected the theories of cultural unity and social progress that had become popular during the Enlightenment. My first two chapters, which focus on Byron and Anglo-Scottish relations, chart the development of Byron's internationalism in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and Hints from Horace, two early neoclassical satires rarely studied as cosmopolitan texts. The next two chapters, which focus on Byron's travels in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, explore the limits of universal cosmopolitanism in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron's first poem explicitly to adopt a Cynical philosophy. My last chapter focuses on Byron's later years when he internalized the principles of Cynical philosophy in Don Juan and The Age of Bronze. The conclusion brings the full scope of Byron's cosmopolitan into focus by examining the urbane rhetoric of the prose writings he prepared in defense of Alexander Pope in 1820 and 1821.