"“A nameless sort of person”? Mobility and the policing of identity in Byron’s Italian years"

Romantic-period studies have been keenly sensitive to the notion of mobility across borders, both in figurative and literal terms, investigating it in relation to issues of personal and national identity. This essay discusses Byron’s various forms of border crossing with specific reference to his Italian years, starting with the most immediate loco-geographic meaning of the term, i.e. Byron’s traversing the many frontiers that marked the Italian territory, which at the time was partitioned in a plurality of states. The focus is on Byron’s experience of the attendant technologies of control which were set into place in the early nineteenth century, testified by his travelling papers and registered, often humorously, in his correspondence. Byron’s musings on the practices and implications of the documentary control of identity and mobility spilled over, in a more serious key, into the concerns of the poetic output of his Italian years, from his dramas to the lines of “To the Po.” Translating the notion of border and border crossing onto the page, in this lyric Byron resisted the crystallizing of identity at work in the biopolitical domain by making the fluidity of the history-laden river Po the locus of his rebirth as transnational subject.