The Name of the Author as Biographical “Neo-myth”: the case of “Byronism”

International audienceStarting from the reflection that the “death of the author” makes hardly any sense in the case of Byron and Byronism, this article argues that the name of the author can be viewed as a particular case of what Edgar Morin calls the “neo-myth”, in which the lived experience makes the abstract idea come alive. Indeed, unlike some other romantic writers, Byron does not ruminate his ego, but creates, and constantly ameliorates, a literary-cum-biographical character that he projects into the world as the image of himself that he conceives of as his legacy to posterity. This merging of life into literature is not the construction of a transcendental self, but much rather a sublimation of the self, foreshadowing T. S. Eliot’s dogma of literary impersonality. Indeed, there is not one Byron, but at least three: the romantic, the neo-Augustan satirist, and the anti-romantic poet. Challenging Bertrand Russell’s portrait of the poet, this article shows that Byron has been characteristically involved in the constantly reiterated effort to invent and remake his literary character, setting a libertarian model of romantic irony that survived him to this day