“Objects, Things, and Writing the Im/material in Byron”

An exploration of Byron’s engagements with writing as a dimension placed between materiality and the immaterial, this essay highlights and evaluates the relevance of this nexus in his output and poetics. After examining Countess Teresa Guiccioli’s travelling chest and her Byron-related souvenirs as a paradigmatic intersection of words and things, it turns to analyze Byron’s idea of writing as an im/material interface, and his poetry (The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour, The Corsair, and Don Juan III) as a container of things and objects. As this essay demonstrates, Byron’s experiments with materiality, its relations with human subjects, and the transcendental side of language, result in a decentered notion of subjectivity that is inextricable from his metaliterary reflections on the im/material implications of writing.