Dark-eyed Maids & Dusky Moors

This Byron Society event hosts Diego Saglio whose talk views Byron’s ‘Spanish-Moorish’ Orientalism within broader contexts in order to explore its specificities. Analyzing passages from Childe Harold I, ‘Alhama’ and Don Juan I, I aim to discuss how what has been called the ‘myth of al-Andalus’ becomes, in Byron’s works, a site of contact and overlap, as well as contraposition and tension. In ways that both reflect and depart from other contemporary writings on Spanish exoticism, Byron’s Spanish Orientalism is another crucial manifestation of his ‘poetics of attrition’, and one that exerted incalculable influence on later authors, not least Spanish ones as they explored and interpreted the historical and cultural peculiarity of their country among other European nations.

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