Department of English and Writing Studies

The autobiographical memoirs of Lord Byron, shredded and burned in John Murray’s parlour on May 17, 1824, retain their reputation today as the most infamous biography never read. As the subject of unprecedented celebrity both at home and abroad, Lord Byron was a self-fashioned public figure whose persona was founded on a paradox of “well-known secrets” reflected in his work. Even today, these public secrets have made literary critics out of Byron’s most shameless gossips, and made gossips out of even the most dedicated literary critics.
         
This paper, then, begins with the facts that are known about Byron’s lost memoir, and charts some of the efforts by which Byron’s critics have sought, in a sense, a spiritual reconstruction of this lost document, even as a literal reconstruction is forever lost to them. The hard facts of Byron’s life are interpreted perpetually through a soft speculation on his character, as represented through a web of anecdotes, letters, gossip, and of course by his poetry itself. The network of Byron’s biography is a wide-ranging tapestry of texts, and this paper draws out from this tapestry the collective narrative they tell about an emblematic figure of life-writing whose ultimate will toward autobiography was stopped in its tracks by a catastrophic destruction of writing which has become, in its way, just another chapter of his story.

The original version of this talk was delivered as an oral, somewhat conversational lecture; the paper has been adapted from this, and I've left it conversational and informal in tone.

In this, my opening chapter to Amy Bright's 2012 critical anthology, _Curious_if_True:_The_Fantastic_in_Literature_, I lay out a historical context for the rest of the volume by tracing the speculative "genre-fiction" of fantasy and science-fiction back to its origins in the late-Gothic fiction of the British Romantic era. Touching briefly on Radcliffe and other "Gothic Schismatic" writers, and more significantly on the impassioned anti-Gothic rhetoric of literary criticism during Radcliffe's lifetime, this paper explores the origins not only of fantastic literature as we know it today, but of the two-centuries-long tradition of debasement that has relegated forms of "genre-fiction" to a second class of prose literature.

Cambridge Scholars Press has graciously made available a sample of the book consisting of the introduction, contents, and the first 20 pages. Fortunately for me, my chapter fills pages 5 to 17, meaning that their "free sample" makes available my chapter in its entirety.

This is the emended text of a poem first published in _Transverse_Journal_ 13 (Fall 2013): 90-2.  It's probably too transparently the product of someone who is a medievalist and a Canadian academic; it will appeal most, perhaps, to people who are likewise both.

A brief statement of context and commentary follows the poem.

It is proposed that an obscure phrase in a skaldic verse by Eyjolfr "skald of bold deeds" in praise of the late tenth-century Eric earl of Lade, Norway, refers to the earl's possession of a golden cup. The textual and material-culture evidence is reviewed, with comparisons from early English, Anglo-Latin, Welsh and Irish texts and from Carolingian art-work.

It is proposed that as the skalds (poets) of early Iceland established themselves as a communal memory resource for not merely Iceland but also Norway and (to a less extent) Denmark, they created a special character or branding for their poetry through the use of Icelandic dialect features, references to stereotypes of Icelandic complexion, and allusions to fellow-Icelanders.

Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations 8 VIKING POEMS ON WAR AND PEACE: A STUDY IN SKALDIC NARRATIVE The Old Norse and Icelandic poets have left us vivid accounts of conflict and peace-making in the Viking Age. Russell G. Poole's editorial and critical analysis ...

1. I should like to express my gratitude to the organizers of the Eleventh International Saga Confer-ence at the University of Sydney, 2–7 July 2000, where an abridged version of this paper was presented, and to participants who offered feedback on that occasion and ...

Famously, the skalds of Iceland successfully took over the mantle of court poet in tenthand particularly eleventh-century Norway (and to an extent in England and other centers of Scandinavian diasporic populations as well). In this way they sustained a partial livelihood. In this paper I am going to propose that we can detect a sense of Icelandic (and to a lesser extent Orkney) identity in some of their verses. These markers might already have been symptomatic of an emerging ideology, to be more explicitly expressed in later prose texts, where “ individual Icelanders, especially upwardly mobile young Icelandic men, are, on a case-by-case basis, represented as better, cleverer, and more gifted than any individual Norwegian, except perhaps the Norwegian king, against whom they frequently measure themselves. Their special talent thus enables them as individuals to be successful in Norwegian society, even though they come from the cultural margin.” 1 That the sense of a community identi...

The Ironic Catastrophe in "Macbeth" NINIAN MELLAMPHY W HEN the final scenes of Shakespeare's tragedies are properly understood, they invariably leave the audience with a sense of uneasiness about the adequacy of the plays' final actions and statements. When this uneasiness arises, as it must, it stems not from suspicions about the adequacy of the dramatist's design but from our discerning a notable gap in judgement between our own response to the shape of events and the response articulated by the society within the play, and from our need to assess the function of this disparity. We feel sure that our understanding of the significance of the tragic action is broader and deeper, more comprehensive altogether, than that arrived at by those who have participated in a spectacle of suffering that we have merely witnessed as an aesthetic construct. Detecting a certain incompleteness, even a certain hollowness, in what might appear to be the play's conclusive statements about itself, we ought to reflect that the society upon the stage is, in its own terms, not upon the stage but in life and that that society, responding as it does to terrible events in life, is only capable of surveying them in the mirror of the very recent past and, at best, of discovering thereby moral and prudential guidelines for the future. It should follow that that society is, properly, so aware of these events as life and not at all as art, that a coincidence of its judgement with the judgement of the society in the theatre (which has witnessed not life but history as tragedy) would be both illogical and indecorous. Such a reflection may, to some extent, qualify our sense of uneasiness, but it does not by any means eliminate it. What does eliminate it is the recognition that the concluding scenes 'The historical Malcolm was killed Nov. 13,1092, "in the 36 yeere of his reigne," lanced through the eye by the devious first Earl of Northumberland, Percy (= "perse eie"), during the siege of "the Castell of Anwike": Holinshed's