Editor's introduction: Byron and disability

This cluster of papers began as a panel on "Byron and Disability" that j organized for the 1999 MLA. As someone who has written about queer issues in literature, I am interested in the unsaid or unsayable: themes, issues, motifs, and approaches that cluster uncomfortably at the margins of traditional critical discourse. As a Byron scholar, I have long felt that, while criticism was at last engaging Byron's sexuality, his status as perhaps the most famous disabled man of his day had received strangely little discussion. Everyone presumably knew about Byron's partial lameness, but no one, evidently, had anything to say about i t More accurately, no one had found a way to translate this fact into a starting-point for critical analysis. The MLA panel and this resulting cluster are my attempt to break this silence by inviting scholars to explore how Byron's disability might be voiced, and, I hoped, to start a dialogue about disability in romanticism more generally. Cliristine Kenyon Jones's paper starts this collection by providing an indispensable overview of the history of attitudes toward Byron's disability. She suggests that there are two major traditions in this history. One, initiated by Thomas Moore, views Byron's disability as a pathetic weakness and treats it in a highly sentimental vein. The other, more characteristic of Byron's own view of himself, brings out the diabolic parallels implicit in Byron's clubfoot to underscore his rebellious, counterhegemonic'flouting of norms. The next three papers, by me* Stuart Peterfreund and Marjean Purinton, present differing approaches to Byron's treatment of disability that focus all or in part on his unfinished drama The Deformed Transformed{1824). In my paper, I discuss this play and Manfred'(1817) in terms of Byron's rebellion against what I call the story of compensation, 1he belief that the disabled are called to attain a higher state of being by struggling with and conquering their supposed handicap. Peterfreund, drawing on a psychological and Lacanian approach to the play, links its interest in physical deformity to the phenomenon of linguistic disability. Purinton, in contrast, situates the play in relation to the "techno-gothic grotesque," an aesthetic mode that she argues helps to define British romantic drama of the period. In this mode, medical