A young lord passes judgment: National characters in the letters, poems and other writings of Byron’s Mediterranean tour (1809-11)

On July 2nd, 1809, Lord Byron and his Cambridge friend John C. Hobhouse embarked on their peculiar Grand Tour. With most of Continental Europe in the hands of Napoleon, Byron and Hobhouse’s destination was Constantinople, the capital of a powerful Ottoman Empire which still controlled much of Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The travellers took a year to reach the Porte. Previous stages in their journey included Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Malta, Albania and Greece. Unlike Hobhouse, Byron was never to publish a travelogue based on his Mediterranean and Levantine experience. However, throughout his tour he did write many letters and occasional poems, not meant for publication, in which he repeatedly passes judgment on the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Greeks, the Albanians and the Turks as national characters –and also on fellow countrymen abroad. In this paper, young Byron’s judgments on said national characters, as manifested in his letters and poems home, are located, grouped together and analysed, for the first time in the literature, in a comprehensive way –thus bringing into question a number of commonly-held misconceptions on the issue. Byron’s own Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (the poem and its notes which, published soon after his Mediterranean experience, famously won him instant recognition in Britain) and Hobhouse’s Journey to Albania and unpublished diary are, in the light of this essay, used as paratexts that enrich the analysis with added, sometimes diverging perspectives. In the light of such corpus, the essay closes with a classification, an explanation and a summary of the consequences of young Byron’s Mediterranean judgments

Entre la leyenda y la historia: Pelayo como tema en el Romanticismo literario estadounidense (1836-1866)

This paper presents and gives details about six arguably important literary worksthat have generally passed unnoticed. All of them include the word Pelayo as part of their title, and their main character is, in all cases, the mythical King of the Asturias of that name. Written in English by Anna Mowatt, William Simms, Elisabeth Porter Beach and Washington Irving, who authored as many as three different «Pelayos», these literary works (poems and short stories) were published in America during the Romantic and Post-Romantic eras, between 1836 and 1866. All of them feature a sense of fascination with the ancient legend, and respond to immediate historical circumstances, developing both concerns in diverse ways. With these interesting fictionalizations of King Pelayo’s historical figure, these authors and their works helped to prolong, in English and from the American cultural standpoint, the afterlife of the Spanish Reconquest’s pioneer and his ancient legend.En este artículo se dan a conocer y se analizan seis obras literarias de importan­cia, pero que han pasado generalmente desapercibidas, cuyos títulos incluyen la palabra Pelayo y que en todos los casos están protagonizadas por la figura del mítico rey de los asturianos. Escritas en inglés por Anna Mowatt, William Simms, Elisabeth Porter Beach y Washington Irving (este último llega a escribir tres distintos «pelayos»), fueron publi­cadas en los Estados Unidos de la época romántica y posromántica, entre 1836 y 1866. Todas ellas se caracterizan por su fascinación ante la antigua leyenda, y por su respuesta a la circunstancia histórica inmediata, desarrollándose tanto la una como la otra de ma­nera original y diferente en cada caso. Con estas interesantes transposiciones de la figura histórica de Pelayo, los autores mencionados y sus respectivas obras contribuyeron a prolongar durante varias décadas, en inglés y desde el ámbito cultural estadounidense, la tradición ya entonces secular de ficcionalización del legendario iniciador de la Recon­quista

Between legend and history: Pelayo as a theme in American literary romanticism (1836-1866)

En este artículo se dan a conocer y se analizan seis obras literarias de importancia, pero que han pasado generalmente desapercibidas, cuyos títulos incluyen la palabra Pelayo y que en todos los casos están protagonizadas por la figura del mítico rey de los asturianos. Escritas en inglés por Anna Mowatt, William Simms, Elisabeth Porter Beach y Washington Irving (este último llega a escribir tres distintos «pelayos»), fueron publicadas en los Estados Unidos de la época romántica y posromántica, entre 1836 y 1866. Todas ellas se caracterizan por su fascinación ante la antigua leyenda, y por su respuesta a la circunstancia histórica inmediata, desarrollándose tanto la una como la otra de manera original y diferente en cada caso. Con estas interesantes transposiciones de la figura histórica de Pelayo, los autores mencionados y sus respectivas obras contribuyeron a prolongar durante varias décadas, en inglés y desde el ámbito cultural estadounidense, la tradición ya entonces secular de ficcionalización del legendario iniciador de la Reconquista.This paper presents and gives details about six arguably important literary works that have generally passed unnoticed. All of them include the word Pelayo as part of their title, and their main character is, in all cases, the mythical King of the Asturias of that name. Written in English by Anna Mowatt, William Simms, Elisabeth Porter Beach and Washington Irving, who authored as many as three different «Pelayos», these literary works (poems and short stories) were published in America during the Romantic and Post-Romantic eras, between 1836 and 1866. All of them feature a sense of fascination with the ancient legend, and respond to immediate historical circumstances, developing both concerns in diverse ways. With these interesting fictionalizations of King Pelayo’s historical figure, these authors and their works helped to prolong, in English and from the American cultural standpoint, the afterlife of the Spanish Reconquest’s pioneer and his ancient legend

The Lake Poets

“If Southey had not been comparatively good,” writes Herbert F. Tucker, “he would never have drawn out Byron’s best in those satirical volleys that were undertaken, at bottom, in order to reprehend not the want of talent but its wastage.” And if Wordsworth and Coleridge had not been dangerously talented, Byron might have spared them some of his stinging sallies. In Table Talk Coleridge proclaimed the conclusion of the “intellectual war” Byron threatened in Don Juan (XI. 62: 496), declaring Wordsworth the poet who “will wear the crown,” triumphing over Byron and his ilk for the poetic laurels of the Romantic period. But Byron was not simply an opponent of his contemporaries. His responses to the Lake poets, particularly to Wordsworth, ran the gamut from “reverence” (HVSV, 129) then “nausea” (Medwin, 237) to Don Juan’s comical though cutting disdain, in under a decade. Focusing on Byron’s relationship with Wordsworth and Coleridge, I will show how Byron’s poetry and drama reveal the range and complexity of his dialogue with his older peers, where, even at their most apparently divergent, the conversation between the poets reveals the depth of the engagement across their works

Exile

Byron rehearsed going into exile in 1809, when he was twenty-one years old. Before setting sail for Lisbon, he wrote, “I leave England without regret, I shall return to it without pleasure. – I am like Adam the first convict sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve, and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab and thus ends my first Chapter” (BLJ 1: 211). Byron’s sardonic perception of himself as a biblical exile foreshadowed the allusive character of his second longer-term exile at the age of twenty-eight, when his carefully staged exit required an audience (some of the same friends and servants), expensive props (a replica of Napoleon’s carriage) and a literary precursor. On his last evening in England, Byron visited the burial place of the satirist Charles Churchill, and lay down on his grave. It was a performance of immense weariness with life and solidarity with an embittered outcast.Postprin

EFL courses in the English philology syllabus: a proposal for basic modular design

This paper attempts to give an answer to the following question: How can we determine the minimal levels of proficiency and the fundamental characteristics of EFL courses at university level? Some final reflections on the importance of this teaching module bring to a close the proposals put forward here

Hacia una sociolingüística histórica de la lengua inglesa: algunas propuestas liminares

This paper propounds certain basic patterns for a renewed consideration of language history and linguistic change, in the light of sociolinguistic methodology and its applications. To this end, three fundamental steps are suggested: defining sociolinguistics as a branch of linguistics in its own right, updating the analytic parameters of historical linguistics, and clarifying the methodological status of language history by leaving the dubious dichotomy between 'external' and 'internal' history. Such a model of sociolinguistics as applied to the history of the English language should eventually result in a renewed vision of the latter discipline within the field of pragmatics

¿Qué paradigma? (Reflexiones en torno al funcionalismo en lingüística inglesa)

Researchers in the field of English linguistics are bound to ask themselves this fundamental question: Which paradigm should I choose as an analytic instrument? The stance adopted in this paper is that the answer to that question should lie not so much in utilizing a given paradigm or in giving way to the temptation of non-critical eclecticism, as in making use of functionalism as a unifying approach

Hacia una sociolingüística histórica de la lengua inglesa: algunas propuestas liminares

This paper propounds certain basic patterns for a renewed consideration of language history and linguistic change, in the light of sociolinguistic methodology and its applications. To this end, three fundamental steps are suggested: defining sociolinguistics as a branch of linguistics in its own right, updating the analytic parameters of historical linguistics, and clarifying the methodological status of language history by leaving the dubious dichotomy between 'external' and 'internal' history. Such a model of sociolinguistics as applied to the history of the English language should eventually result in a renewed vision of the latter discipline within the field of pragmatics