George Gordon, Lord Byron

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

  • descended from two aristocratic clans with colourful backgrounds

  • became a Lord at age 10; attended Harrow and Cambridge

  • suffered from a malformed foot, a source of much embarrassment

  • became a fashionable celebrity, involved in various sex scandals

  • model for the “Byronic hero,” a prevailing Romantic archetype • assisted in the Greek war for independence (NAEL D630-34)

Byron, Don Juan (1819-1824)

  • pronounced Don Joo’-un

  • published in instalments from 1819 until Byron’s death in 1824

  • meant to be read rapidly, to reflect its improvisational method of composition

  • longest satirical poem in English, consisting of some 2,000 stanzas

  • satirizes the archetypal Spanish libertine, traditionally a man of enormous sexual energy but in Byron’s poem depicted as a naif (NAEL D690-91)

Byronic Hero

  • a mysterious and gloomy figure, superior in his passions to the common run of humanity, whom he regards with disdain

  • tortured by an enormous, unnamed guilt that drives him towards an inevitable doom

  • exerts a powerful, erotic attraction upon other characters

  • depicted in Byron’s Childe Harold (1816) and Manfred (1817)

  • model for Heathcliff in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) (NAEL D631, Baldick 47)

  • risk takers

  • strong silent type

Byron, Don Juan (1819-1824)

  1. seduced by Julia; sent abroad

  2. captured by pirates into slavery

  3. taken to Turkish harem

  4. further exploits in harem

  5. affair with Turkish Sultana

  6. escape from harem to Europe

  7. romantic intrigues in Europe

  8. goes to way in Europe

  9. in the Russian court

  10. sent from Russia to England

  11. in the English court

  12. safeguards daughter LEila

  13. party with Amundevilles

  14. English country life, fox hunt

  15. Lady Adeline advises marriage

  16. interacts with a ghost

  17. unfinished diversion

  • Canto: Italian for ‘song’, a subdivision of an epic or other narrative poem, equivalent to a chapter in a prose work (Bladuck, 52)

Don Juan in Music and Literature

  • 1630: Gabriel Tellez (Tirso da Molina), El burlador de Sevilla

  • 1665: Moliere, Le Festin de Pierre

  • 1676: Thomas Shadwell, The Libertine

  • 1736: Carlo Goldoni, Don Giovanni Tenorio o sia il Dissoluto

  • 1786: W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni

  • 1824: Lord Byron, Don Juan

  • 1830: Alexander Pushkin, The Stone Guest

  • 1872: Robert Browning, Fifine at the Fair

  • 1903: George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

  • 1958: Henri de Montherlant, Don Juan

Picaresque

  • from the Spanish picaró, meaning “rogue” or “scoundrel”

  • traditionally, a work with a picaroon as its hero, a quickwitted servant of several masters

  • recounts their escapades in firstperson with an episodic structure

  • can now refer to a loosely structured sequence of episodes recounting a hero’s long journey

  • mostly in prose, but Byron’s Don Juan is a poetic example (Baldick 277-78)

Mock Epic

  • a poem employing the lofty style and the conventions of epic poetry to describe a trivial or undignified series of events

  • a kind of satire that mocks its subject by treating it in an inappropriately grandiose way

  • often include epic conventions such as invocations, battles, supernatural machinery, etc.

  • most famous example in English is Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712-14) (Baldick 229)

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