"Byron and the critics in the new millennium"

The assessment of the quality of Byron’s verse and Byron’s thought has always been a controversial issue, largely depending on aesthetic but also on ideological criteria. Intertwining with the development of literary criticism as a professional discipline, Byron’s fortune was subject to considerable changes over the last century, so much so that the position of Byron within the canon of Romanticism was repeatedly redefined depending on the presuppositions of the various critical schools: the neglect of the New Critics, whose ideal of self-contained, distilled and impersonal art left little room for Byron’s effusiveness, was followed first by the renewed interest of New Historicism, elicited by Byron’s relevance to a plurality of contexts, and later by the multiple and innovative approaches of post-structuralism. Drawing on the wealth of documentation assembled by Rutherford, Reiman and Nicholson, Jane Stabler (1998) and Caroline Franklin (Byron, 2007) have accurately mapped the evolution of Byron criticism in their studies of the poet. Complementing their chronological overview, this essay will address the relationship between Byron and his 20th- and 21st-century critics by concentrating on major thematic clusters at the centre of the critical debate, starting with the issue of the relationship between the personality of the poet and his verses. The focus will be on the many examples of biographical and/or contextual criticism that were applied to Byron’s works, and the attendant critical discussions of cultural constructs such as the Byronic hero, Byron’s masks, Byron’s mobility, ‘Byromania’, Byron’s sexual identity and the gender issues raised by his production. A second cluster will deal with the debate about Byron’s ‘thought’ and the often diverging opinions about his philosophy (or the lack thereof) – variously highlighting his link with the tradition of philosophical scepticism, his use of Romantic irony, his pessimism, the religious unorthodoxy or alternatively the spiritual overtones of his works – as well as the debate about his conceptions of history and his controversial political views.