Byron S Heroines

"Alas! the love of women! it is known/ To be a lovely and fearful thing!" (Don Juan, st. 199) Traditionally seen as an archetypal masculine poet, better known for his relationships with women than for the sympathetic study of them, Lord Byron has not lent himself easily to a feminist critique. In this, the first such example, Caroline Franklin takes an original and polemical standpoint, reading Byron within the setting of the contemporary debate on the nature, role, and rights of women in society. The heroines of Byron's narrative and dramatic verse are considered, not from a biographical perspective, but by relating these representations to ideologies of sexual difference which held in the poet's day. Viewed in their literary-historical context, these Byronic heroines are compared with other female protagonists of the age, thereby revealing the poet to be unusually honest and bold in his portrayal of female sexuality and its relation to political issues.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, printed single-sided, grade: 1,3, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Department of English and Linguistics), course: Proseminar I: Reading the Novel, language: English, abstract: 165 years after its first publication in England, Charlotte Bronte's "female Bildungsroman" (Gilbert and Gubar 339) Jane Eyre still prompts questions for both its readership and the literary scholars of today. Depicting the protagonist's development from a poor orphan girl to a young governess who "yearns for true liberty" (Gilbert and Gubar 347), Bronte evokes a utopian ideal of a strong-minded heroine who defies social customs by marrying her master, Edward Fairfax Rochester. When pondering over Bronte's comment to her publisher in 1848, "[t]he standard hero[e]s and heroines of novels are personages in whom I could never . . . take an interest, believe to be natural or wish to imitate: were I obliged to copy these characters, I would simply not write at all" (qtd. in Brennan 16), one can draw conclusions about Bronte's intention to reward her heroine with Rochester, who is widely accepted as the epitome of a Byronic hero (cf. Wootton 231, Gilbert and Gubar 337) - a "unique" (Thorslev 12) hero whose name re-fers to its real-life impersonator, the English Romantic poet George Gordon "Lord" Byron. As this paper is concerned with the question whether the Byronic hero embo-dies the desirable husband for a governess in nineteenth-century England, a brief overview of the reception of Byron and his works as a "cultural phenomenon" (Elfenbein 47) during Bronte's time seems necessary and will be dealt with in the first part of this pa-per. Andrew Elfenbein's study Byron and the Victorians from 1995 serves as a valuable source which particularly considers Byron's female readership and offers reasons for his popularity among them. Since most scholars view Rochester as a Byronic hero while merely fo

Byron’s Religions is the most comprehensive study yet of the poet’s deep, diverse and eclectic attitude to religion. The articles, by several well-known and distinguished scholars, cover many of his poems and plays, taking in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Blasphemy, Calvinism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. The tentative conclusion is that Byron was never the atheist which the cliché has him to be, but a man whose profound need for a faith clashed always with an equally profound scepticism.

Described as 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' by one of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron was the quintessential Romantic. Flamboyant, charismatic and brilliant, he remains almost as notorious for his life - as a political revolutionary, sexual adventurer and traveller - as he does for his literary work. Yet he produced some of the most daring and exuberant poetry of the Romantic age, from 'To Caroline' and 'To Woman' to the satirical English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, his exotic Eastern tales and the colourful narrative of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the work that made him famous overnight and gave birth to the idea of the brooding Byronic hero.

This study of Byron’s last complete long poem, the comparatively neglected The Island, is the first to devote a whole book to the examination, contextualization and motivation of both the poetry and its poet. It is much more than just a monograph, however; aside from biographical considerations, it illumines aspects of study that embrace feminism, racial politics and social considerations in relation to Polynesian island society, all of which are contrasted with the loose anarchy of an eighteenth century group of British mutineers. Two historical contexts – the infamous 1789 mutiny on the Bounty and Byron’s life in the year that led up to the poem’s composition – serve as an extended prelude to a deep analysis of the major symbols and characters in the poem, while its main chapters range beyond The Island, conducting a literary conversation with Shakespeare, Pope, 18th-century writers of memoirs and nautical sea history, classical authors and even Chinese poets, as well as other Romantic poets. Consideration is given to aspects of racial and feminist theory in relation to the poem’s extraordinary central female character; in particular there is a focus on her promotion of the poem’s happy ending, one that is quite unique in Byron’s oeuvre. The Appendix contains the first-ever published transcript of the holograph of the poem, allowing readers to appreciate Byron’s idiosyncratic and expressive punctuation—as well as his first thoughts before editing.

This set reissues 7 books on the Romantic poet Lord Byron originally published between 1957 and 2005. The volumes examine Byron’s poetry, his poetic development, and his social and private life. Lord Byron’s epic satiric poem Don Juan is examined by some of the leading scholars of Romanticism.