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This work argues that there are traces of Sufism to be found in British Romanticism. Most scholars of Romanticism have overlooked the impact of Sufism on Romanticism in favour of Christian and neo-Platonic Mysticism, but this work fills in this gap by showing the magnitude of the influence of Sufism on the Romantics without negating the influence of other -isms. What elements of Sufism attracted the attention of the Romantics? And why were the Romantics attracted more to Sufism and Sufi poets than to Christian Mysticism and Mystic poets?

On the 3rd of December, 2021, Professor Itsuyo Higashinaka published the Japanese edition (translation) of Lord Byron’s Don Juan in two volumes comprising 1,092 pages.

He began his intensive reading, research, and translation of Don Juan at the turn of century. After about twenty years of hard work, the translation, which include enlightening notes, was published by Mr. Takashi Yamaguchi, president of Otowashoboh-Tsurumi Shoten, in Tokyo, Japan. Besides the outstanding translations of Byron’s seventeen cantos, Professor Higashinaka inserted relevant illustrations in the first volume; and in the second, he appended a Byron chronology and summaries of the cantos.

We, all members of the Japanese Byron Society, believe that this work is a culmination of Byron studies in Japan. We are absolutely confident that his unprecedented Japanese translation of Don Juan will promote Byron studies among younger generations in our country.

A special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly on Project MUSE now.

Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle

Ever since his childhood and adolescence and before he became a legendary poet, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron, felt the sense of escaping from the anxieties of his traumatic present to the glorious worlds of Eastern history and mythology. In Eastern mythology, which he read and loved, Byron approached his own utopia and dystopia without distancing himself from current world affairs. He heard the voice of mythology in various forms: in Nature and its animate and inanimate elements, in nightingales, eagles, roses, trees, bushes, mountains, plains, oceans, stones, and rocks, and in ancient relics, among others. Nature and the ruins of the past spoke to him more truth about God, Man, and Nature than religion and history books. His immediate impressions while being on-the-spot, his mobility, his standing on the borderlines of fact and fiction, and his extensive references to Eastern mythology in his works, created a Byronic myth and enhanced the mythical quality of his works, especially Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II, and his Oriental Tales—The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and The Siege of Corinth. Lord Byron became an archetype of a legendary celebrity, and his works and some of his characters, especially his Byronic Heroes and Heroines, became universal mythical characters. Among several questions, the book answers two major ones: First, how does Byron use Eastern mythology, including Greek, Persian, and Arabian in the above-mentioned works to render his own poetry mythological? And second, how do his personal affairs and mythological works contribute to the generation of the still living Byronic myth? 

Byron: Reality, Fiction and Madness

Edited by Mirosława Modrzewska and Maria Fengler

 Series: Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture-Peter Lang

ISBN: 978-3-631-80537-4

This book explores the amorphous, fragmented and digressive world of George Gordon Byron’s poetic works, which are pervaded by the themes of change, mutability, deformation and transgression, often presented or described as madness. The blurring of the border between fiction and reality is a matter of the author’s decisions concerning both his life and his texts, and a conscious process of construction and self-fashioning. It is also a recurring epistemological theme in Byron’s works, which make take the form of　narrative dis-orientation and the dismantling of easy cultural pre-conceptions. The Authors study Byron’s artistic quixotism and his pursuit of creative freedom which reveals itself in the Romantic irony, digressiveness and self-awareness of his writings.

 More Information: https://www.peterlang.com/view/9783631805374/html/ch08.xhtml

MODERNITY'S MIST: BRITISH ROMANTICISM AND THE POETICS OF ANTICIPATION by EMILY ROHRBACH

Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Whereas Romanticism is well known for its relation to the past, Emily Rohrbach situates Romantic epistemological uncertainties in relation to historiographical debates that opened up a radically unpredictable and fast- approaching future. As the rise of periodization made the project of defining the "spirit of the age" increasingly urgent, the changing sense of futurity rendered the historical dimensions of the present deeply elusive.

While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Rohrbach draws attention to moments when these writers felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age. Illuminating the poetic strategies Keats, Austen, Byron, and Hazlitt used to convey that sense of mystery, Rohrbach describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority--of uncertainty concerning what will have been. Romantic writers, she shows, do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make imaginable a new way of thinking the historical present when faced with the temporalities of modernity.

STIRRING AGE: SCOTT, BYRON AND THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE by Robert McColl

Comparisons of Scott and Byron, so natural to 19th century readers, are scarce nowadays. Using a variety of critical and philosophical vocabularies, this study provides a timely and original study of two giants of 19th century European literature engaged in an experimental, mutually-informing, act of genre-splicing, seeking to return history and romance to what both perceived was their native complementarity.

The book shows how both writers utilise historical example to suggest the continuing relevance of romance models, and how they confront threats to that relevance, whether they derive from the linear conception of history or the ‘romantic’ misapprehension of it. The argument proceeds by examining those threats, and then weighing the revival of romance via, rather than contra, the historical.

Purchases can be made from www.cambridgescholars.com

New book by Mary O’Connell on Byron’s relationship with John Murray, published by Liverpool University Press

Byron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher

Mary O’Connell