Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity

Abstract

The Regency period in general, and the aristocrat-poet Lord Byron in particular, were notorious for scandal, but the historical circumstances of this phenomenon have yet to be properly analysed. Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity explores Byron's celebrity persona in the literary, social, political and historical contexts of Regency Britain and post-Napoleonic Europe that produced it. Clara Tuite argues that the Byronic enigma that so compelled contemporary audiences - and provoked such controversy with its spectacular Romantic Satanism - can be understood by means of 'scandalous celebrity', a new form of ambivalent fame that mediates between notoriety and traditional forms of heroic renown. Examining Byron alongside contemporary figures including Caroline Lamb, Stendhal, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Castlereagh, Tuite illuminates the central role played by Byron in the literary, political and sexual scandals that mark the Regency as a vital period of social transition and emergent celebrity culture.

‘He is rather peculiar, perhaps’: Reading Mr Rochester’s Coarseness Queerly

“…In Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (2014), Tuite describes how Byron's mediated public scandal and notoriety by deploying and displacing erotic language to conceal the specificity of his sexual life. 28 Likewise, in her pioneering text, Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick's considers the wider signification of Victorian homosexuality as 'unspeakable' as a means to enable covert discussion. 29 Brontë's novel employs both of these literary strategies, configuring a conventional reading that enables the façade of heterosexual respectability alongside oblique and indirect references to the queer erotic.…”

“…34 Moreover, in her discussion of Byron, Tuite discusses Byron's 'outrageous appetite for lies', noting how they enabled the social façade of "normalcy". 35 Later in the text, Rochester's manipulation of his sexual past and marital present is revealed. Perhaps, then, Rochester's confession here anticipates this falsehood by navigating the hetero/homo binary that informs gender and sexual norms.…”

‘It is unseemly to be famous’: Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and the melodramatic dynamics of the myth of the Russian poet in Russia and the West

“…Byron, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce loom particularly large (Glass 2004, Jaffe 2005, Mole 2007, McDayter 2009, Leick 2009, Goldman 2011, Tuite 2015. While acknowledging the importance of extending discussion beyond 'highbrow' literary celebrity --as some scholars have (Hammill 2007, Weber 2012) --this article discusses two 'culturally "authoritative'' poets (Moran 2000, p. 6), who enter into the suspicion-laden, 'compulsive pas-de-deux' with mass culture described by Huyssen (1986, p. 47) and explored in relation to literary celebrity by scholars such as Jaffe (2005) and Goldman (2011).…”