Abstract

The love story of Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb has traditionally functioned in literary history to confirm Byron's seductive fatality and Lamb's banality. This essay engages the Lamb-Byron affair in order to highlight the complexity and symbolic power of Lamb's performances as a social and literary celebrity. It argues that the social and textual performances that mark the affair as a public event raise critical issues about the relations between private and public in the romantic literary marketplace, about the sociality of romantic literature and love, and about the interrelations between romantic literature, romantic love, and romantic-period scandal.

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