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2024 Winner
2024 Winner
Richard Cronin
Richard Cronin
Byron's Don Juan: The Liberal Epic of the Nineteenth Century
Byron's Don Juan: The Liberal Epic of the Nineteenth Century
"Richard Cronin’s astute and accessible reassessment of Byron’s epic both challenges conventional critical readings of Don Juan and signposts the path for future critical responses to the poem, placing it in conversation with the emergent and still largely inchoate category of liberalism. In this wide-ranging exploration, Cronin’s unconventional sense of Don Juan as an ‘anti-heroic’ poem is carefully argued for and draws on a wealth of contextual and textual knowledge. But for all its attention to matters of biography, society and politics in Britain and Europe, Cronin never loses sight of the numerous ways -- whether through Byron’s playful punning, digressions within digressions, use of dashes or poetic form -- that these contexts inflect our own reading of Don Juan as a literary text. This powerful scholarly work sets out the spirit of the times that Byron’s writing reflects, arguing, amongst other things, that Don Juan is as close in flavour to the cut and thrust of the Romantic periodicals as it is to epic forbears such as Paradise Lost. Cronin makes the strong case that the poem is about heroism in an unheroic age, and that it fits an age defined largely by its uncertainty where, as Byron has it, ‘Few mortals know the end they would be at’. In its scope, range, and critical acumen this is an important book for scholars of Byron and Romanticism alike."
"Richard Cronin’s astute and accessible reassessment of Byron’s epic both challenges conventional critical readings of Don Juan and signposts the path for future critical responses to the poem, placing it in conversation with the emergent and still largely inchoate category of liberalism. In this wide-ranging exploration, Cronin’s unconventional sense of Don Juan as an ‘anti-heroic’ poem is carefully argued for and draws on a wealth of contextual and textual knowledge. But for all its attention to matters of biography, society and politics in Britain and Europe, Cronin never loses sight of the numerous ways -- whether through Byron’s playful punning, digressions within digressions, use of dashes or poetic form -- that these contexts inflect our own reading of Don Juan as a literary text. This powerful scholarly work sets out the spirit of the times that Byron’s writing reflects, arguing, amongst other things, that Don Juan is as close in flavour to the cut and thrust of the Romantic periodicals as it is to epic forbears such as Paradise Lost. Cronin makes the strong case that the poem is about heroism in an unheroic age, and that it fits an age defined largely by its uncertainty where, as Byron has it, ‘Few mortals know the end they would be at’. In its scope, range, and critical acumen this is an important book for scholars of Byron and Romanticism alike."
Elma Dangerfield Prize Committee
Elma Dangerfield Prize Committee
The aim of the prize is to identify and reward new and original work related to the life and works of the poet Lord Byron. It will be awarded to the best book (or, exceptionally, books) on Byron or a Byron-related topic published in any given year, according to the judgement of an Evaluation Committee appointed by the Joint Presidents of the IABS.
The Evaluation Committee will be made up of three academics from three different countries. Committee members will not be paid, and the committee’s composition will not be made public. The Joint Presidents will appoint a replacement for any Evaluation Committee member unable to carry out his/her duties. The Evaluation Committee will report progress regularly to the Joint Presidents. The members of the Evaluation Committee must exclude themselves from the discussion of their own books.
The Evaluation Committee will propose the winning book, substantiate their proposal in a written report and submit it to the Joint Presidents for the announcement of the winner. Winners will then be informed in confidence, before the award is publicly announced at the following IABS Annual General Meeting and in the next issue of The Byron Journal.
Books eligible for the prize must be peer-reviewed and published by an academic or trade press. Preference will be given to books written in English, or translated into English. Undergraduate textbooks will not be considered.
Authors wishing to have a book considered for the prize must submit one copy of the book to one of the IABS’s Joint Secretaries.
Winners of the prize cannot submit another book for consideration for a period of five years.
All books will be evaluated strictly on the basis of their academic value, without regard to their country of publication or the nationality of the author.
2023 Winner
2023 Winner
Jerome McGann
Byron and the Poetics of Adversity (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Jerome McGann
Byron and the Poetics of Adversity (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
2021 Winner
Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones
2021 Winner
Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones
Dangerous to Show: Byron and his Portraits (London: Unicorn, 2020)
On behalf of the IABS Joint Presidents and the Elma Dangerfield Prize Committee, we would like to congratulate Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones as this year’s winners of the Elma Dangerfield Prize.
Their book, Dangerous to Show: Byron and his Portraits (London: Unicorn, 2020), is, in the words of Jerome McGann, ‘a book of the visions that transfigured Byron’, combining, as Miranda Seymour puts it, ‘meticulous scholarship and a wealth of information with a glorious treasure-trove of images’.
The Elma Dangerfield Prize Committee thought the book ‘an extraordinarily thorough investigation which juxtaposed different versions of paintings and sculptures and, where possible, traced their provenance; offering along the way measured reassessments and several new insights’. The Committee went on to say:
The text was quietly authoritative – beautifully written and buttressed with impeccable scholarly referencing. It was keyed in nicely to a wealth of images – some very familiar of course but several new even to seasoned Byronists. The product of many years’ patient research by its two authors, Dangerous to Show achieved the difficult feat of being attractive and accessible to the general reader, whilst at the same time contributing original and rigorous scholarship to the academic work on Lord Byron. The panel feels that this impressive book will become the classic work on this subject for many years to come and is a very worthy winner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize for 2021.
2020 Winner
Dr. Michael Steier
2020 Winner
Dr. Michael Steier
Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement (London: Routledge, 2019)
On behalf of the IABS Joint Presidents and the Elma Dangerfield Prize Committee, we would like to congratulate Dr. Michael Steier as this year’s winner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize.
Dr. Steier’s monograph Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement (London: Routledge, 2019) explicates the literary relationship between Byron and Leigh Hunt, exploring a relationship that would help define Byron’s poetry.
This study will provide an invaluable resource to Byron scholars as much as Hunt scholars.
In the words of the award committee, the book "charts the sometimes rivalrous and sometimes collaborative relationship from Byron and Hunt's earliest days of juvenilia and literary satire, to their radical political crusades, Italophile poetics and founding of a journal. It demonstrates unequivocally that the friendship between Byron and Hunt has been previously underestimated and oversimplified. An assured performance, this is a hugely enjoyable book…
This monograph will become the reference book on the Hunt/Byron connection, as well as a very useful resource on Byron generally, and on a large cast of figures, coteries, and literary-cultural phenomena from the 1810s to the 1820s."
2019 Winner
Miranda Seymour
In Byron’s Wake. The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace (London: Simon and Schuster, 2018)
2018 Winner
Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia (eds.)
Byron and Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018)
2017 Winner
Bernard Beatty and Jonathon Shears (eds.)
Byron’s Temperament: Essays in Body and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016)
2016 Winner
Sarah Wootton
Byron’s Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
2015 Winner
Clara Tuite
Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
2014 Winner
Roderick Beaton
Byron’s War: Romantic Revolution, Greek Rebellion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
2013 Winner
Caroline Franklin
The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and Byronism (London and New York: Routledge, 2012)
2012 Winner
Itsuyo Higashinaka
Byron the Protean Poet (Kindaibungeisha, Tokyo, 2010)
Draft of statement
Our records do not go back further than 2013. If you received the Elma Dangerfield award please provide bibliographical information indicating the year of the award and title of your book and we will happily your name to the list of award winners on this website.
Please send your information to kailarose.muses@gmail.com
Apologies for any omissions: our records do not extend back to the award's inception.
Lifetime Achievement Award
Lifetime Achievement Award
Bernard Beatty
University of Liverpool, University of St Andrews, UK
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