Conference Topic: “Byron and Genre”
Under this thematic umbrella, practically all of Byron's works are pertinent and could be approached from different perspectives. Exploring Byron’s works, his journals, and his correspondence through genre allows fresh and engaging debates about issues such as Byron’s use of various genre and his responses to genre and gender, genre and history, genre and culture, genre and poetic modes, etc… and the validity of his prescriptive definitions of genres such as biography, travel literature, narrative romances, epistolary, dramatic unities, satire, comedy, tragedy, etc… And perhaps also an interesting revisionary study by William Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (OUP 2009) which won the ESSE Award last year. Duff challenges the widespread interpretation of Romanticism as a period of the "extinction of traditional genres" and focuses on “broader” genre patterns established by means of comparative study of West European Romanticisms (English, German and French).

Paper topics may include:
1. Byron’s manipulations of the narrative genres such as the romance, the epic, lyric; his Oriental tales, dramatic plays, and satirical works are also relevant
2. Byron’s contribution to travel literature through works such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan
3. Byron’s contribution through autobiography and journal writing or the epistle genre through his letters and correspondences
4. Byron’s challenging the already established genres and thus his questioning the issue of genre itself
5. Other contemporary writers and genre in relation to Byron’s—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Hobhouse, Moore, Galt, Hope, Southey, Morier, etc.
6. Byron’s representations by novelists, dramatists, documentarians; etc.
7. Byron´s relation to Neo-classicism.
8. An important and fresh topic could be Byron, the media and filmography; i.e., investigating how the media and movie as genres presented Byron.
Abstracts of 200‐300 words (Kindly See the Conference Registration Form) may be sent to Prof. Naji Oueijan, Conference Chair, at noueijan@ndu.edu.lb or noueijan@hotmail.com before May 1, 2012.