Byron and Latin Culture consists of twenty-three papers, most of which were given at the 37th International Byron Conference at Valladolid, Spain, in July 2011. An introduction by the editor describes in detail the huge influence which the major Latin poets had on Byron: his borrowings, imitations, parodies, and echoes have never been catalogued in such detail, and it becomes clear that many ideas central to Don Juan, in particular, derive from Ovid, Virgil, Petronius, Martial and the other great classical writers. There are substantial sections on the ways Byron was influenced by, and in turn influenced, the literature and art of France, Spain, Italy, and other nations. Contributors include John Clubbe, Richard Cardwell, Madeleine Callaghan, Alice Levine, Itsuyo Higashinaka, Olivier Feignier, Katherine Kernberger, and Stephen Minta.

In 1495, the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija published a Spanish-to-Latin dictionary that became a best seller. Over the next century it was revised dozens of times, in nine European cities. As these dictionaries made their way around the globe in this age of encounters, their lists of Spanish words became frameworks for dictionaries of non-Latin languages. What began as Spanish to Latin became Spanish to Arabic, French, English, Tuscan, Nahuatl, Mayan, Quechua, Aymara, Tagalog, and more. Tracing the global influence of Nebrija's dictionary, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, in this interdisciplinary, deeply researched book, connects pagan Rome, Muslim Spain, Aztec Tenochtitlan, Elizabethan England, the Spanish Philippines, and beyond, revealing new connections in world history. The Translations of Nebrija re-creates the travels of people, books, and ideas throughout the early modern world and reveals the adaptability of Nebrija's text, tracing the ways heirs and pirate printers altered the dictionary in the decades after its first publication. It reveals how entries in various editions were expanded to accommodate new concepts, such as for indigenous languages in the Americas -- a process with profound implications for understanding pre-Hispanic art, architecture, and writing. It shows how words written in the margins of surviving dictionaries from the Americas shed light on the writing and researching of dictionaries across the early modern world. Exploring words and the dictionaries that made sense of them, this book charts new global connections and challenges many assumptions about the early modern world.

The study examines cultural effects of various colonial systems of government in the Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean in a little investigated period of transition: from the French Revolution to the abolition of slavery in Cuba (1789–1886). The comparison of cultural transfer processes by means of literary production from and about the Caribbean, embedded in a broader context of the circulation of culture and knowledge deciphers the different transculturations of European discourses in the colonies as well as the repercussions of these transculturations on the motherland’s ideas of the colonial other: The loss of a culturally binding centre in the case of the Spanish colonies – in contrast to France’s strong presence and binding force – is accompanied by a multirelationality which increasingly shapes hispanophone Caribbean literature and promotes the pursuit for political independence. The book provides necessary revision to the idea that the 19th-century Caribbean can only be understood as an outpost of the European metropolises. Examining the kaleidoscope of the colonial Caribbean opens new insights into the early processes of cultural globalisation and questions our established concept of a genuine western modernity. Updated and expanded translation of Die koloniale Karibik. Transferprozesse in hispanophonen und frankophonen Literaturen, De Gruyter (mimesis 53), 2012

Andalucia is the quintessence of Spain and yet, historically and culturally, it is surprisingly unlike the rest of the country. Its literary history began to develop with the Romans and reached an early flowering when Arabic poets drew on centuries of literary tradition, together with the landscapes and passions of Moorish Spain. Later, Prosper Mérimée, Byron and Washington Irving forged legends of exotic southern Spain that persist to this day and Spanish writers themselves captured the rich tapestry of Andalucian culture, from Cervantes' Seville to the Córdoba of Baroque poet Luis de Góngora and Lorca's 'hidden Andalucia'. With the advent of the Civil War, a new generation flocked to Andalucia and were inspired to write some of the twentieth century's most iconic works of literature, from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth and Laurie Lee's trilogy of books. As vibrant and compelling as the region itself, Andalucia: A Literary Guide for Travellers illuminates the very soul of Spain.

The works of Lord Byron and his friend Sir Walter Scott had an influence on European literature which was immediate and profound. Peter Cochran’s book charts that influence on France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia, with individual chapters on Goethe, Pushkin, and Baudelaire – and one special chapter on Ibsen, who called Peer Gynt his Manfred. Cochran shows that, although Byron’s best work is his satirical writing, which is aimed in part at his earlier “romantic” material and its readership, his self-correction was not taken on board by many European writers (Pushkin being the exception), and it was the gloomy Byronic Heroes who held sway. These were often read as revolutionaries, but were in fact dead-end. It was a mythical, not a literary Byron whom people thought they had read. The book ends with chapters on three British writers who seem at last to have read Byron, in their different ways, accurately – Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats.

This book approaches Byron from a completely new angle: no longer seen in terms of his status as a celebrity and a star on the book-selling market, Byron is instead seen as an outsider both in Regency society and, even more so, for his iconoclastic views of life and literature.