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(2013) Reading historical fiction, Dordrecht, Springer.
In 1853, George Henry Lewes (1896, 3: 250) wrote in disgust of Charles Kean's spectacular performance of Byron's Sardanapalus: "Is the Drama nothing more than a Magic Lantern on a large scale? Was Byron only a pretext for a panorama? It is a strange state of Art when the mere accessories become the aim and purpose of representation.' Lewes clings here to an ideal of authenticity profoundly antithetical to the collaborative "literary system of Byronism' that Jerome Christensen (1993, xvi) argues sustained and disseminated the "residual affective charge' of aristocratic glamour associated with the poet. This chapter reads the popular nineteenth-century visual mediation of Byron in a range of panoramic formats as part of this Byronic literary system's habitual association of reading Byron with the automatic recognition of visual cues and emulative re-enactment. Beginning with the circulation of extracts from Byron's poems in early panoramic guides and reviews of various Leicester Square panoramas and concluding with the spectacular use of panoramic technologies in mid-nineteenth century adaptations of one of Byron's many controversial historical fictions, Sardanapalus, this chapter argues that the inter-medial and miscellaneous reading practices encouraged by these various panoramic revisions of Byron constitute far more than a mere accessory to the "aim and purpose of representation'.
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Full citation:
Groth, H. (2013)., Panoramic Byron: reading, history and pre-cinematic spectacle, in K. Mitchell & N. Parsons (eds.), Reading historical fiction, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 85-100.
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