Byron and Marginality

The collection of essays intends to show that everything about Byron’s poetic work baffles the scholarly desire for neat categorisations. Various attempts at re-mapping Romanticism have given ample evidence of the fact that, as one of the ‘big six’ in the Romantic canon, Byron outgrows Romanticism and epitomises the fallacious character of a period that has always been compared to a dangerous quicksand. In his self-incurred marginality, Byron subjects the entire genre of poetry to a severe process of deconstruction: his œuvre ranges from verse tale to “epic narratives”, versified romances and poems which subvert the rigorous metrical and formal requirements and turn poetic forms into leaky vessels of incoherent quotations, intertextual reference and Molly Bloomian soliloquies.Taking to his role as a cultural fence-sitter, scoffer and outsider who watches his literary ambience from the stern perspective of a Neo-Classicist, Byron unveils and lays bare the repressed strata of human savagery which Romantic poetry normally glosses over and ignores.Doing the exact opposite of what Novalis and others circumscribed as the ‘poeticisation’ of prosaic 19th-century reality, Byron subscribes to the idea that man is irretrievably a bête humaine, much more akin to the liver-devouring vulture than to Prometheus. It is this premise of ontological marginality that is eventually reflected in all aspects of Byron’s textual, generic, thematic and topographical marginality.