2022 She hath a Spell Beyond Her Name: Byron's Poetic Reflections on Venice, Subjectivity, and Temporality

The Armstrong Browning Library & Museum
and the 19CRS proudly present

"She hath a Spell Beyond Her Name:
Byron's Poetic Reflections on Venice, Subjectivity, and Temporality"
featuring

Dr. Mark Sandy
Professor of English, Durham University (UK) and
Armstrong Browning Library Three-Month Research Fellow
[Biographical Information]

Friday, April 8, 2022 - 3:00 p.m. CDT
Armstrong Browning Library & Museum
Hankamer Treasure Room
and livestreamed on Zoom
Handout: Word | PDF

Venice as both historical place and atemporal myth, the realised and unrealizable city, is central to a poetics of temporality and selfhood in Byron. For the Byronic imagination, Venice is the real and unreal city that commingles its solid architectural structures with watery insubstantiality, myth with history, personal memory with historical monument, and poetic artistry with the writing of history. Historically Byron acknowledges that Venice is lost, but her presence persists in his a-temporal poetic re-imaginings of her former glory. In Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron finds a fallen Venice to be both “lost and won.” The self-preserving and self-destructive myth of Venice holds an abiding fascination for the Romantic imagination and its poetics of subjectivity. She is an impossible architectural city of imaginative possibilities whose presence Byron’s poetry casts as a perpetually charmed spot and broken spell.

If you have any questions about this upcoming event, please contact Christi Klempnauer at Armstrong Browning Library & Museum at (254) 710-4968 or email abl_office@baylor.edu