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I recently read that there was a surge in Lord Byron’s popularity in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. I find that so hard to believe. It must have simply vanishe
by Mediterraneo10 8y ago
I recently read that there was a surge in Lord Byron’s popularity in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. I find that so hard to believe. It must have simply vanished from American consciousness without a trace after the war (Stefan Zweig’s novels are a similar case).
How many American schoolchildren in the last several decades read any Byron? Even at the university level, I never read him directly, I only heard some things about him that were mainly negative, like his sexism, or his role in insisting that a newly independent Greece revive the Ancient Greek culture that Western Europeans expected from it, when it fact Greece had been a deeply Orthodox Christian society for 1500 years and all those pagan gods and Athenian or Spartan values had long been forgotten.
- jeffinpdx 8y agoMany AP English classes teach Byron. Many an English teacher loves a hater like Byron
- cafard 8y agoFor what value of "last several"? Honestly, I'm not at this point sure whether I read any Byron in high school English. I have the impression that he was very popular in the US curriculum until the modernists devalued the romantics.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> How many American schoolchildren in the last several decades read any Byron? I did in the late 1980s, which at three decades sago is within the minimum span that could be intended by “several”.