期刊名称：E-rea : Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1638-1718
出版年度：2005
卷号：3
期号：2
页码：1
出版社：Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
摘要：William Hazlitt repeatedly suggested that Byron's poetry consisted of fine-sounding commonplaces and observed that the author of Childe Harold described the “stately cypress, or the fallen column, with the feeling that every schoolboy has about them”. This pretty damning judgement, shared by Arthur Hugh Clough (in his hexameter poem Amours de Voyage), may account both for the popularity of Byron's verse during his life-time and for the kind of posthumous fragmentation of the work into the “magnificent” passages appended to guidebooks. The notion of the commonplace—the second-hand and inauthentic emotional response—shadows Byron's writing in all its phases, particularly in its relationship to places of historical significance and fame, such as the Coliseum or the plain of Waterloo. Authenticity is a central topic of Byron and Place, part of the argument of which is to suggest that anxiety about responding to places of historical fame is a central part of Byron's imagination, but that the idea of the commonplace becomes transformed in the use Byron makes of his actual experience and direct knowledge of such places gained in his travels. Byron and Place avails itself of a broad field of enquiry known as the “new geography” or the “cultural geography” that emerged in the eighties, drawing on a wide range of cognate disciplines and aiming at a sustained rethinking of space and place (calling these rethinkings “philosophical” raises expectations which the present work cannot quite meet, it should be observed in all fairness). It also dovetails with one of the aims of New Historicism, namely the recovery of lived experience. As such, and because of its chronological orientation, prompted and conditioned by Byron's manifold travels, Byron and place also reads like a well-informed “topo-biographical study”.
