My talk considers Canto IV of Childe Harold in terms of historical expectations of Romantic travel writing. I begin by looking at some of the travel literature present in Byron's library, including Bruce's 1805 Travels, Dutens' 1806 Memoirs of a Traveler, Edward Clarke's Travels, and Langsdorff's 1813 Voyages and Travels, pointing out some of the salient features of those works which informed Byron's own poem, particularly in terms of elements of ordering and organization and self-representation. In addition I make use of Byron's own notebooks and correspondence to show how closely the events of the poem parallel his 1816 journey through Italy. By making this connection clear in the preface to Canto IV, Byron gives his "fictional" travel narrative immediate historical and biographical context, anticipating, and perhaps manufacturing his readers' misreading of the line between poet and speaker.
After establishing the generic background and Byron's case in particular, I look at periodical reviews of Canto IV from the Monthly Review, Blackwood's and Scott's review from the Quarterly Review among others, to show how a reading of Childe Harold as travel narrative is supported by contemporary context. Romantic reviewers of Canto IV understood that Byron was working within a popular genre, but they also recognized that he was doing something quite new. My paper looks at three specific ways in which Byron "plays" with travel narrative:In the concluding portion of my paper I discuss ways in which Childe Harold was marketed and "packaged" as travel (and popular) literature. The reviews and John Murray's publishing strategies reinforced public acceptance of Childe Harold as travel literature, in fact as a sort of "travel guide" to Italy. I end with some thoughts about marketing the Byronic experience, and ways in which the travel/biography/romance/history genres combine to produce interesting readings (one example would be the ironic juxtaposition of the poem's hero as Grand Tourist/Romantic Hero/Revolutionary).
The goal of my talk is to show Byron consciously working within a genre he knew well, while at the same time exploiting the concept of travel metaphorically to create a hybrid work transcending genre. Canto IV has often been considered one of the weaker Cantos (Bloom calls it a "failed synthesis" in The Visionary Company) but I make a case for reevaluating this portion of the poem in terms of generic and historical context. Some of the past work on Childe Harold has dealt with some of the points above, but to my knowledge there have been no studies of Byron's library, and hence no attempt to connect the poem more or less directly not only to Byron's own experience but directly in the context of extant travel narratives.
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