Registration Now Open - 'Don Juan: Reception, Conception & Imitation'
A guest post by Dr Emily Paterson-Morgan, Director of The Byron Society, inviting you all to attend the Byron Society conference in December this year!
2019 marks the bicentennial of the publication of the first two cantos of one of Byron’s greatest works, perhaps the greatest.It has been two hundred years since Don Juan was first published by John Murray, who viewed it as an incredibly high-risk form of cultural terrorism; ‘the die is cast as in a gambling game’ he wrote to Byron the day after ‘having fired the Bomb’ into the unsuspecting public. And in that two hundred years, those who dismissed Don Juan as a work of debauched doggerel ‘fit only for the shelves of a brothel’, those who urged Byron to abandon his new poetic vision, and those who argued that such a thematically incontinent work promoting religious and sexual infidelity would never find an audience, have been proven wrong again and again.
Don Juan’s digressive irreverence and blithe conversational tone, the complex interweaving oftales of doomed love and hangover cures, coupled with highly astute social and political commentary, have ensured its enduring popularity and continued relevance.The Byron Society are celebrating the lasting appeal of ‘Donny Johnny’ with a one-day conference on the 7th of December. Don Juan: Reception, Conception & Imitation will be held in Nottingham at the Antenna Media Centre. There will be a keynote from Professor Jerome McGann entitled ‘Byron and his Language’, and we are thrilled to have so many new academics engaging with Don Juan in our special Postgraduate and ECR panel.For more details and Registration click here.Byron possessed a remarkable knack for adaptive emulation, famously leading Wordsworth to classify him as ‘the Mocking Bird of our Parnassian ornithology’. The conference celebrates this trait with a series of papers considering the poet’s engagement with everything from ancient philosophy to modern scientific advances, music and law, Homer to Hobhouse.The conference is equally a celebration of the fact that Byron’s satirical epic has itself become a source of inspiration. These range from contemporary imitations such as Lady Caroline Lamb’s clever parodies and the ham-fisted dramatic adaptations by Charles Milner, to the works of Sinead Morrissey and A.E. Stallings in the present day.In Canto III, the poet writes of the persuasive power of the written word ‘which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think’, and this conference highlights the continuing influence of Don Juan today. As Lawrence Durrell wrote:
You, the speaking and the feeling who come after:I sent you something once – it must beSomewhere in Juan– it has not reached you yet. O watch for this remoteBut very self of Byron and of me,Blown empty on the white cliffs of the mind,A dispossessed His Lordship writing youA message in a bottle dropped at sea.
Don Juan’s combination of charm, humour and sly innuendo are perfectly suited to the modern era and, if anything, it is more accessible today than it was two hundred years ago. Join us on the 7th of December and discover more about this remarkable poem.