(DOWNLOAD) "Crossing "Dark Barriers": Intertextuality and Dialogue Between Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott (Critical Essay)" by Studies in Romanticism # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Crossing "Dark Barriers": Intertextuality and Dialogue Between Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott (Critical Essay)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 236 KB
Description
IN CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE, CANTO 2 (1812), AS HAROLD VENTURES into Ottoman-ruled Albania, Byron writes of his protagonist s passing "From the dark barriers of that rugged clime/ ... o'er many a mount sublime, / Through lands scarce notic'd in historic tales" (11.2.46.406-9). (1) Even the classical mountain of poets, "Lov'd Parnassus, fails," he informs us, "to match some spots that lurk within this lowering coast" (412-14). The darkness of the mountainous border of Albania--a barrier, indeed--into "scarce notic'd" lands where beauty and wild grandeur "lurk," serves as a metaphor for the barbarism of a generally unenlightened, non-western Near East. Behind the rugged peaks lies a culture mysterious because of an apparent lack of western literary representation. Harold continues into a land where "Rock, river, forest, mountain, all abound ... Beneath, the distant torrent's rushing sound ... where the volum'd cataract doth roll / Between those hanging rocks, that shock yet please the soul" (48.428-32). Although Albania was a comparatively new locus of literary representation within Europe, the Near East more generally had a literary history, having captured the popular imagination in Britain throughout the eighteenth century. The Arabian Nights, published firstly in French and subsequently translated into English between 1704 and 1713, ran through several editions. Other oriental tales were set in North Africa and the Middle East, including Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), Beckford's Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1786) and satires such as Montesquieu's Persian Letters (Ozell's English translation 1722) and Frances Sheridan's The History of Nourjahad (1767). A flourishing trade in travel writing featuring the East, around the turn of the nineteenth century, fashioned a public appetite for poetry, novels and descriptions of enchanting and barbarous societies. If the "East" seems a strange place to begin a comparative essay between Walter Scott and Byron, who appear to have "northernness" and Caledonia more obviously as their common ground, we should consider Scott's view of the Highlands in Canto I of his 1810 poem, The Lady of the Lake. (2) Scott positions his adventurer with a view from the edge of civilization as he looks towards "the fragments of an earlier world" (20). The narrator's metaphors of architectural fragments imagine the foreground peaks of the Grampian range to be "fantastically set" with cupolas and minarets, whilst the more distant "wild crests" are "ever deck'd as pagods, / or mosque of eastern architect" (1.11). In the following canto, the Highland clansmen appear as "darkening specks upon the tide" (2.16), rowing towards the foreground from the far end of Loch Katrine.