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Byron, Sheridan, and the afterlife of eloquence
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Taylor, David F. (2014) Byron, Sheridan, and the afterlife of eloquence. The Review of English Studies, 65 (270). pp. 474-494. doi:10.1093/res/hgt091 ISSN 0034-6551.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/res/hgt091
Abstract
As Matthew Bevis has shown, Byron’s verse returns again and again to mine the speeches of the late eighteenth-century’s most celebrated orators, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan in particular. Yet, such a return to the oratorical past, which can only be achieved through a manifestly textual archive, is always fraught with difficulty. Focusing on the series of speeches delivered by Sheridan in 1787–1788 during impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings–speeches Byron held in high regard–this essay contends that Byron’s various written engagements with Sheridan’s oratory are moments at which he consciously problematizes the possibility of recalling or emulating speeches that have been passed down to the poet’s present in inherently unreliable textual forms. This essay first elaborates the key contexts for this discussion: Byron’s oratorical obsession, his high opinion of Sheridan as a public speaker, and his reading of eighteenth-century elocutionary theory, which staked it claims about the cultural efficacy of eloquence on the dichotomy of writing and speaking. It then offers close readings of those passages in Byron’s Monody on the Death of R. B. Sheridan (1816) and his journal of ‘Detached Thoughts’ (1821–1822) where the poet attempts both to retrieve and to negotiate his own position in relation to Sheridan’s voice, acts of remembrance and often also of emulation that are riven with a sense of their own necessary failure. Finally, this essay suggests that in Don Juan, Byron develops a poetics that accommodates, indeed embraces, the unstable afterlife of oratory.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | The Review of English Studies | ||||||
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||
| ISSN: | 0034-6551 | ||||||
| Official Date: | June 2014 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 65 | ||||||
| Number: | 270 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 474-494 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1093/res/hgt091 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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