Romantic Writing and the Determinations of Cultural Property

Abstract

The massive transfer of artworks and antiquities during the Napoleonic era from sites in Greece, Italy, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East to public museums and private collections in Britain and France established the legal and political basis for current discourses of cultural property. This essay—part of a larger project on the ruins of empire—explores writing produced by Byron and by Percy Shelley during their visits to Rome (in 1817 and 1818–1819, respectively) and emphasizes the ways in which they recurrently position themselves at intersections between a resistant desire for aesthetic autonomy on the one hand and a critical recognition of historical and political determinations on the other. That Byron’s and Shelley’s poetic performances and identities themselves acquired the status of cultural property is pivotal to my argument.

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