The Byron Society of America at MLA
40th Anniversary
By Shannon Heath
University of Tennessee
The 128th Convention of the Modern Language Association in January 2013 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Byron Society of America’s annual sponsorship of an MLA discussion panel. Founded on January 22, 1973, the BSA celebrated the close of its first year in operation with its inaugural session at the 88th Annual MLA Convention in Chicago, Illinois. An opening talk by founding member and newly appointed chair John Clubbe detailed upcoming events for the fledgling Society, including information on events in Britain and Greece commemorating the sesquicentennial of Byron’s death. A concurrent MLA session awarded BSA co-founder Leslie A. Marchand with the “James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association” for outstanding critical work on Byron’s Letters and Journals, the first volume of which had appeared earlier that year.
In subsequent years the Byron Society of America distinguished itself as a constant presence in the world of Romantic studies, as well as an outlet for groundbreaking scholarship at the MLA Conventions. In 1976, for example, Jerome McGann not only spoke on “The Oxford Edition of Byron and Some New Byron Poems,” but also fielded questions from an overflow audience about the just discovered Scrope Davies trunk. The trunk, which had been found in the vault of Barclays Bank in Pall Mall, contained various notebooks and personal papers belonging to Davies, as well as an original manuscript of Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, early copies of Percy Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc,” as well as many previously unknown letters from Lord Byron.
The 95th Annual MLA Convention in 1980, held in Houston, Texas began the first of several panels co-hosted with the Keats-Shelley Association in addition to the usual BSA discussion session. The 1980 special program arranged by Marsha Manns entitled “This Living Hand – A Visitation by John Keats,” took the form of a dramatic performance by Mark Stevenson, actor and author of the one- person play, with follow-up questions answered by Stevenson and Ronald Sharp of Kenyon College.
In fact, the 1980s marked a busy time for Romantic scholarship and Byron studies in particular, following the 1982 publication of the twelfth volume of Marchand’s edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals. The session topics, “Working with Byron” (1982) and “Byron’s Letters and Journals: Reevaluations” (1984) reflect the growing interest in textual criticism and biography motivated by Marchand’s work, and also evidenced by the Keats-Shelley Association’s 1984 panel, “Editing the Romantics.” During its 1984 panel, the BSA presented Marchand with a plaque celebrating the completion of the Letters and Journals, while papers from Larry Peer (Brigham Young, University), Frederick Shilstone (Clemson University), and Patricia Johnson (University of Minnesota) highlighted the new perspectives made possible by such a foundational work.
The 1987 MLA Convention in San Francisco revealed a flurry of activity in Byron studies on the eve of Byron’s 200th birthday in January 1988, with organizations sponsoring no less than six panels featuring presentations on Byron, in addition to the BSA’s own yearly discussion. Panels such as “The Spirit of the Age: Reappraising Romantic Genius” and “Byron’s Impact on Younger Writers,” both hosted by the Keats-Shelley Association, and “The Value of Romanticism II: Romanticism and Evaluation” hosted by the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, focused on appraising and reevaluating the status of Romantic studies in general. The BSA celebrated Byron’s bicentennial birthday with the topic, “Beginning Byron’s Third Century,” featuring presentations which looked toward largely unexplored areas of interest. Paper’s such as Frederick Burwick’s examination of the Hebrew Melodies and Martin Meisel’s discussion of “Byronic Images” are in many ways early examples of the scholarly trends toward multimedia studies and popular culture, and anticipate more recent discussions such as 2000’s “Images of Byron,” 2008’s “Byron and/as/in Popular Culture” and 2011’s “Byron: Lives and Afterlives.”
The BSA’s annual panel also continued to showcase early versions of many important works of literary scholarship, such as Malcolm Kelsall’s 1988 presentation on “Byron and the Country House Tradition,” an essay in advance of his 1993 book The Great Good Place: The Country House in English Literature; William St. Clair’s 1990 presentation on “Who Read Byron in His Time?”, an essay which outlined the early stages of his seminal 2004 work,The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period; and Jonathan Gross’s 1995 paper, “‘One Half What I Should Say’: Byron’s Gay Narrator in Don Juan,” a precursor to the 2001 text, Byron: The Erotic Liberal.
In 2004, the Byron Society’s annual MLA discussion panel also acted as an important venue for drawing attention to the Byron Society Collection. The Collection, which was founded in 1995 by Marsha Manns and Leslie Marchand to honor the bequest of BSA member Jacqueline Palmer, had grown rapidly with the addition of several important donations, including the substantial Byron library of Michael Rees. The Society’s 2004 panel on “Byron in the East: Research Resources on the Atlantic Coast” sought to create interest in the Collection as a research destination by focusing particular attention on the non-print elements unique to its holdings. Charles E. Robinson (University of Delaware) chaired the session which included papers on “Institutional Collections in New England and New York: Where Money Reigned,” by Donald H. Reiman; “Byron’s Philadelphia” by Stuart Curran; and “The Byron Society Collection: ‘Many Things Most New to Ear and Eye’,” by Marsha M. Manns.
The late 2000s also marked a particularly busy time for the BSA, as the Society hosted dual panels at three consecutive MLA conventions. In 2008, the BSA sponsored complementary panels “Byron and/as/in Popular Culture” Parts I and II, the first being the regular session examining Byron as both a product of and a reaction to his own popular culture, as well as the ways in which the Byron myth has been incorporated into more contemporary texts. A sizeable audience gathered to hear the second session, a special roundtable discussion hosted by Peter Graham, in which Graham, Jonathan Gross, Katherine Kernberger and author Benjamin Markovits discussed the first two novels in Markovits’s Byron-inspired trilogy and the practice of writing literary fiction. For the second dual session in 2009, the Byron Society co-hosted a panel with the Discussion Group on Scottish Literature, the first time in which an allied organization programmed a joint session with a division. In this session organized by Fiona Wilson and entitled “‘Four O’Clock Friends’: John Murray and his Circle,” David McClay (the National Library of Scotland), Hermione de Almeida, and Susan Oliver explored the relationships between major authors such as Byron and Sir Walter Scott, and the Murray publishing house operated by John Murray II in the early nineteenth-century. In 2011, Jonathan Gross hosted a special MLA approved session entitled “Remembering Carl Woodring: Tactful Truth Teller in Literature’s Embattled Profession,” honoring Romanticist Carl Woodring, who passed away in September 2009. Speakers for the panel were Nina Auerbach, Steven Jones, and Anne Mellor, three of Woodring’s most notable students. Auerbach celebrated Woodring’s insightful analysis of the problems plaguing literary scholarship in “Carl Woodring, Tactful Truth- Teller,” while Jones and Mellor’s papers, “Politics and Prints in English Romantic Poetry” and “Engendering the Politics of English Romantic Poetry” respectively, honored Woodring’s mentorship and guidance as well as his professional contributions in emphasizing the importance of a New Historicist approach to Romantic studies.
In its forty-year history, the Byron Society of America’s annual MLA discussion panel has highlighted many of the important moments in Romantic and Byron scholarship, from revealing new discoveries, previewing new works in progress, examining current issues and trends, and celebrating scholarly achievements, keeping Byron studies at the forefront of Romantic scholarship. As one of the first allied organizations to sponsor its own program, the Byron Society of America set a high standard for scholarly achievement and academic participation, a standard which no doubt will continue as the Society and its annual MLA panel enter their fifth decade.