Byron and Travel

Abstract

This chapter addresses the centrality of travel to Lord Byron’s career and poetic creativity. The first section focuses on the travel poem that made Byron famous, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: it discusses Byron’s Mediterranean tour of 1809–11, the poet’s cosmopolitan persona in Childe Harold, and the poem’s influence on later touristic practices. The second section explores the complex political implications of Byron’s self-fashioning as a transgressive, alienated traveller allegedly at odds with his homeland. The final section then considers the period after 1816 when Byron became a permanent exile from Britain. Here travel arguably gave way to transculturation, as Byron found himself increasingly ‘Italianized’ by his extended residence in that country. This makes Byron’s post-1816 writings a revealing case study of what it means not just to be performatively cosmopolitan but to actually cross cultural borders and so acquire a more genuinely hybrid, ‘hyphenated’ cultural identity.