Exploding Magazines: Byron’s The Siege of Corinth, Francesco Morosini and the Destruction of the Parthenon

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Published: May 1, 2013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.17440
Keywords:
Byron Morosini Parthenon romanticism Turkish tales Greece 1821
David Roessel
Richard Stockton College, New Jersey
Abstract
This paper links several threads connected to Byron‟s least regarded Turkish Tale. Why, when the English Parliament decided in June 1816 to purchase the Elgin Marbles for the British Museum, did Byron appear to be silent on a subject that he had expressed strong feelings about some years earlier? Why, when he attacked Lord Elgin on the Parthenon marbles, did he not link him in infamy with Francesco Morosini, who had fired the shot that blew up the Parthenon? And why, in The Siege of Corinth, did Byron intentionally depart from the account in his historical source?
My paper argues that The Siege of Corinth, one of his Turkish Tales that includes a conflict between Venetians and Turks, a siege, and an explosion, contains within it Byron‟s reflections on these issues The Siege of Corinth, in short, has more layers than have previously been explored.
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Author Biography
David Roessel, Richard Stockton College, New Jersey
avid Roessel is Professor of Greek at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, teaching Ancient Greek, Classical literature in translation, and twentieth-century American literature. He is the author of In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (OUP, 2002), as well as the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays by Tennessee Williams, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes and The Correspondence of H.L. Mencken and Ezra Pound. He has published articles on Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Hemingway and other modernist writers, as well as on Homer and Latin Elegy.
References
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