Alan Rawes

MAIN RESEARCH INTERESTS

LORD BYRON
My principal research interest is Lord Byron, especially in relation to European Romanticism and, currently, particularly in relation to Italy. I am the author of Byron's Poetic Experimentation (Ashgate, 2000) and numerous essays on Byron in The Keats-Shelley Journal, The Byron Journal, The Cambridge Companion to Byron, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, European Romantic Review, The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron and other journals and books. I was the editor of The Byron Journal between 2005 and 2012, and have spoken on Byron at international conferences in the UK, the US and Europe. I have also organised a number of international Byron conferences in the UK and Italy, and was Joint President of the International Association of Byron Societies between 2012 and 2023.

My recent and ongoing work on Byron focuses very much on the poet's engagement with Italy and Italian literature. I have published essays on Byron's translation of Pulci, his relation to the Risorgimento, Alfieri's influence on Byron's plays, Byron's 'lyric' Rome and 'Byron and Italian Literature'. I have also co-edited a special issue of Literaria Pragensia on 'Byron in Italy' (2013), Byron and Italy (Manchester University Press, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (2024). I am currently working on a monograph provisionally called The Napoleon of Rhyme: Byron's Literary Conquest of Italy. 

OTHER RESEARCH INTERESTS

I have further research interests across European Romantic-period literature, as well as in poetic form, Romantic (auto)biography, literary inter-relations between the four nations of the UK in the Romantic period, Romantic constructions of Britishness and literary influence, particularly across national cultures. My main publications in these areas include Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom (Manchester University Press, 2010), Romanticism and Form (Palgrave, 2007), Romantic Biography (Ashgate, 2003), English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and essays on Burns's reputation in Italy, Byron and Pushkin and P. B. Shelley's rhyme schemes.