Byron and the Difficulty of Beginning
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Kierkegaard and Byron: Disability, Irony, and the Undead
University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2015 Kierkegaard And Byron: Disability, Irony, And The Undead Troy Wellington Smith University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Troy Wellington, "Kierkegaard And Byron: Disability, Irony, And The Undead" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 540. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/540 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. KIERKEGAARD AND BYRON: DISABILITY, IRONY, AND THE UNDEAD A Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English The University of Mississippi by TROY WELLINGTON SMITH May 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Troy Wellington Smith ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT After enumerating the implicit and explicit references to Lord Byron in the corpus of Søren Kierkegaard, chapter 1, “Kierkegaard and Byron,” provides a historical backdrop by surveying the influence of Byron and Byronism on the literary circles of Golden Age Copenhagen. Chapter 2, “Disability,” theorizes that Kierkegaard later spurned Byron as a hedonistic “cripple” because of the metonymy between him and his (i.e., Kierkegaard’s) enemy Peder Ludvig Møller. Møller was an editor at The Corsair, the disreputable satirical newspaper that mocked Kierkegaard’s disability in a series of caricatures. As a poet, critic, and eroticist, Møller was eminently Byronic, and both he and Byron had served as models for the titular character of Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary.” Chapter 3, “Irony,” claims that Kierkegaard felt a Bloomian anxiety of Byron’s influence. -
Poems About Poets
1 BYRON’S POEMS ABOUT POETS Some of the funniest of Byron’s poems spring with seeming spontaneity from his pen in the middle of his letters. Much of this section comes from correspondence, though there is some formal verse. Several pieces are parodies, some one-off squibs, some full-length. Byron’s distaste for most of the poets of his day shines through, with the recurrent and well-worn traditional joke that their books will end either as stuffing in hatshops, wrapped around pastries, or as toilet-tissue. Byron admired the English poets of the past – the Augustans especially – much more than he did any of his contemporaries. Of “the Romantic Movement” he knew no more than did any of the other writers supposed now to have been members of it. Southey he loathed, as a dreadful doppelgänger – see below. Of Wordsworth he also had a low opinion, based largely on The Excursion – to the ambitions of which Don Juan can be regarded as a riposte (there are as many negative comments about Wordsworth in Don Juan as there are about Southey). He was as abusive of Keats as it’s possible to be, and only relented (as he said), when Shelley showed him Hyperion. Of the poetry of his friend Shelley he was very guarded indeed, and compensated by defending Shelley’s moral reputation. Blake he seems not to have known (“Blake” was him the name of a well-known Fleet Street barber). The only poet of whom his judgement and modern estimate coincide is Coleridge: he was strong in his admiration for The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel; about the conversational poems he seems blank, and he feigns total incomprehension of the Biographia Literaria (see below). -
Byronic Heroism Byronic Heroism Refers to a Radical and Revolutionary
Byronic Heroism Byronic heroism refers to a radical and revolutionary brand of heroics explored throughout a number of later English Romantic and Victorian works of literature, particularly in the epic narrative poems of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, including Manfred, Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Giaour, and The Corsair. The figure of the Byronic hero was among the most potent and popular character archetypes developed during the late English Romantic period. While traditional literary heroes are usually marked by their valor, intrinsic goodness, commitment to righteous political and social causes, honesty, courage, propriety, and utter selflessness, Byronic heroes are defined by rather different character traits, many of which are partially or even entirely opposed to standard definitions of heroism. Unlike most traditional heroic figures, Byronic heroes are often deeply psychologically tortured and reluctant to identify themselves, in any sense, as heroic. Byronic heroes tend to exhibit many of the following personality traits: cynicism, arrogance, absolute disrespect for authority, psychological depth, emotional moodiness, past trauma, intelligence, nihilism, dark humor, self-destructive impulses, mysteriousness, sexual attractiveness, world- weariness, hyper-sensitivity, social and intellectual sophistication, and a sense of being exiled or outcast both physically and emotionally from the larger social world. Byronic heroes can be understood as being rather akin, then, to anti-heroes (unlike Byronic heroes, though, anti-heroes tend to be rather reluctant or helpless heroes). Byronic heroes are often committed not to action on behalf of typically noble causes of “good,” but, instead, to the cause of their own self-interest, or to combatting prevailing and oppressive social and political establishments, or to particular problems or injustices in which they take a particular and often personal interest. -
Turkish Tales” – the Siege of Corinth and Parisina – Were Still to Come
1 THE CORSAIR and LARA These two poems may make a pair: Byron’s note to that effect, at the start of Lara, leaves the question to the reader. I have put them together to test the thesis. Quite apart from the discrepancy between the heroine’s hair-colour (first pointed out by E.H.Coleridge) it seems to me that the protagonists are different men, and that to see the later poem as a sequel to and political development of the earlier, is not of much use in understanding either. Lara is a man of uncontrollable violence, unlike Conrad, whose propensity towards gentlemanly self-government is one of two qualities (the other being his military incompetence) which militates against the convincing depiction of his buccaneer’s calling. Conrad, offered rescue by Gulnare, almost turns it down – and is horrified when Gulnare murders Seyd with a view to easing his escape. On the other hand, Lara, astride the fallen Otho (Lara, 723-31) would happily finish him off. Henry James has a dialogue in which it is imagined what George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda would do, once he got to the Holy Land.1 The conclusion is that he’d drink lots of tea. I’m working at an alternative ending to Götterdämmerung, in which Brunnhilde accompanies Siegfried on his Rheinfahrt, sees through Gunther and Gutrune at once, poisons Hagen, and gets bored with Siegfried, who goes off to be a forest warden while she settles down in bed with Loge, because he’s clever and amusing.2 By the same token, I think that Gulnare would become irritated with Conrad, whose passivity and lack of masculinity she’d find trying. -
“The Blazing Muse” Hysteria and the Politics of Popularity
\ 1 | “The Blazing Muse” Hysteria and the Politics of Popularity Over the past century, two very different representations of Byron have dominated literary criticism and the popular imagination: Byron, the self-styled Gothic hero of Byromania, and the more “mature” Byron of political satire and Don Juan. Both Byrons have been well represented in literature, fi lm, and criticism, but over the years the difference between them has been marked by a line drawn in the sand of Romantic studies, instigated in part by the infl uential commentaries of M. H. Abrams, Leslie Marchand, and, most notoriously, T. S. Eliot.1 This cultural divi- sion of the Byron corpus, however, has a powerful antecedent among Byron’s own contemporaries, and twentieth–century critics are arguably simply following the lead of their predecessors when they differentiate the “legitimate” poet from his status as popular icon. As Andrew Elfen- bein points out, nineteenth-century critics were quick to recognize the cultural “one-upmanship” to be had from creating a division between the “lowbrow” reader of the fantasy romances and the more astute readers of Byron’s “true” character: Particularly for presumptive members of Britain’s social or artistic elite, Byron was signifi cant less because of his sexual attractiveness than because his career allowed them to distinguish themselves from the reactions of “ordinary” readers. Such elite readers were attracted to Byron as a means by which to demonstrate the fi tness of their cultural judgments by criticizing him in a uniquely “personal” way.2 Elfenbein goes on to note, this “critical distance from Byromania is familiar to students of Romanticism” precisely because so many of Byron’s contemporaries were very vocal about their distaste for, in 29 ©2009 State University of New York Press, Albany 30 byromania and the birth of celebrity culture Keats’s terms, the “figure he cut” in literary society. -
1815 1817 George Gordon, Lord Byron 1788-1824
http://www.englishworld2011.info/ GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON / 607 (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprises as its species, gaming; swinging or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of the Daily Advertiser in a public house on a rainy day, etc. etc. etc. 1815 1817 GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 1788-1824 In his History of English Literature, written in the late 1850s, the French critic Hip- polyte Taine gave only a few condescending pages to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Keats and then devoted a long chapter to Lord Byron, "the greatest and most English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest together." This comment reflects the fact that Byron had achieved an immense European rep- utation during his own lifetime, while admirers of his English contemporaries were much more limited in number. Through much of the nineteenth century he contin- ued to be rated as one of the greatest of English poets and the very prototype of literary Bomanticism. His influence was manifested everywhere, among the major poets and novelists (Balzac and Stendhal in France, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky in Russia, and Melville in America), painters (especially Delacroix), and composers (including Beethoven and Berlioz). Yet even as poets, painters, and composers across Europe and the Americas struck Byronic attitudes, Byron's place within the canon of English Bomantic poetry was becoming insecure. -
Shelley Meagher – Politics and Persian Mythology in Irish Poetry
Shelley Meagher Politics and Persian Mythology in Irish Poetry IN 1809 LORD BYRON was prevented by the Napoleonic wars from taking the European Grand Tour. He instead sailed south, through the straits of Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean, to tour Greece and Turkey. On his return he published the first two Cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), a poem whose hero follows in Byron’s wake eastwards. Gratified by the acclaim Childe Harold received, Byron next published two action poems set in Turkey, The Giaour (1813) and The Bride of Abydos (1813). These fluent ‘Turkish Tales’, as he called them, sold very well and whetted the public’s appetite. On the day Byron’s next Turkish tale, The Corsair, came out in 1814, it sold 10,000 copies. There was one problem. For two and a half years Byron’s friend, Thomas Moore, had been composing a poem set in the Persianate cultures of Mughal India and Persia (as Europeans then termed Iran). Moore was alert to differences between Turkish and Persian culture. But to the general public, both cultures were simply eastern. When sales of Byron’s Turkish poems rocketed, Moore fretted that Byron had stolen his opportunity. Byron tried to allay Moore’s fears. ‘Stick to the East!’ he wrote to Moore in May 1813. ‘The little I have done . is only a “voice in the wilderness” for you; and, if it has had any success, that will only prove that the public is orientalising, and pave the way for you.’1 When, six months later, Byron proceeded to pave Moore’s way further with The Corsair, he knew very well that Moore would be alarmed. -
Don Juan Study Guide
Don Juan Study Guide © 2017 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher. Summary Don Juan is a unique approach to the already popular legend of the philandering womanizer immortalized in literary and operatic works. Byron’s Don Juan, the name comically anglicized to rhyme with “new one” and “true one,” is a passive character, in many ways a victim of predatory women, and more of a picaresque hero in his unwitting roguishness. Not only is he not the seductive, ruthless Don Juan of legend, he is also not a Byronic hero. That role falls more to the narrator of the comic epic, the two characters being more clearly distinguished than in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In Beppo: A Venetian Story, Byron discovered the appropriateness of ottava rima to his own particular style and literary needs. This Italian stanzaic form had been exploited in the burlesque tales of Luigi Pulci, Francesco Berni, and Giovanni Battista Casti, but it was John Hookham Frere’s (1817-1818) that revealed to Byron the seriocomic potential for this flexible form in the satirical piece he was planning. The colloquial, conversational style of ottava rima worked well with both the narrative line of Byron’s mock epic and the serious digressions in which Byron rails against tyranny, hypocrisy, cant, sexual repression, and literary mercenaries. -
Correspondence of Lord Byron, with a Friend
^M 8£ DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Treasure "Room CORRESPONDENCE LORD BYRON. PRINTED BY JULES DIDOT, SENIOR, PRINTER TO HIS MAJESTY, RUE DD PONT-DK-LODI, N° 6. CORRESPONDENCE WITH A FRIEND, INCLUDING HIS LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER, WRITTEN FROM PORTUGAL, SPAIN, GREECE, AND THE SHORES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN, IN l8og, 1 8lO AND l8l I. ALSO UettHltctioM of fbt $oet. BY THE LATE B. C. DALLAS, ESQ. •» THE WHOLE FORMING An Original Memoir of Lord Byron's Life, FROM 1808 TO 18 I 4- • AND A CONTINUATION AND PRELIMINARY STATEMENT OF THE PROCEEDINGS BY WHICH THE LETTERS WERE SUPPRESSED IN ENGLAND, AT THE SUIT OF. LORD BYRONS EXECUTORS. BY THE REV. A. R. C. DALLAS. VOL. III. PUBLISHED BY A. AND W. GALIGNANI, AT THE ENGLISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, GERMAN, AND SPA.NISH LIBRARY, l8, RUE VIVIENNE. 4825. 159783 — '3 , CONTENTS. VOL. III. Pages Recollections i — 126 Correspondence of Mr Dallas with Lord Byron, considered to be here ended. —Lord Byron's residence in London enables Mr Dallas to have personal intercourse with him.—January and February, 1812.—Mr Dallas attempts to have the poem entitled Euthanasia suppressed. — Succeeds for the first edition. —Mr Dallas's affection for Lord Byron. —Combats his errors.—His depression of spirits.—His family history and circumstances. —Character of his uncle, Captain George Byron,—his death a great loss to the Poet.—It broke the link with his other family alliances. —Neglected by his relatives at school and college.—His Satire caused him to be beheld with respect, but with awe. —He felt himself alone in London.—His affairs involved. -
History and Vision in Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats Timothy Ruppert
Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 2008 "Is Not the Past All Shadow?": History and Vision in Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats Timothy Ruppert Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Ruppert, T. (2008). "Is Not the Past All Shadow?": History and Vision in Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1132 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “IS NOT THE PAST ALL SHADOW?”: HISTORY AND VISION IN BYRON, THE SHELLEYS, AND KEATS A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Timothy Ruppert March 2008 Copyright by Timothy Ruppert 2008 “IS NOT THE PAST ALL SHADOW?”: HISTORY AND VISION IN BYRON, THE SHELLEYS, AND KEATS By Timothy Ruppert Approved March 25, 2008 _____________________________ _____________________________ Daniel P. Watkins, Ph.D. Jean E. Hunter , Ph.D. Professor of English Professor of History (Dissertation Director) (Committee Member) _____________________________ _____________________________ Albert C. Labriola, Ph.D. Magali Cornier Michael, Ph.D. Professor of English Professor of English (Committee Member) (Chair, Department of English) _____________________________ Albert C. Labriola, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Professor of English iii ABSTRACT “IS NOT THE PAST ALL SHADOW?”: HISTORY AND VISION IN BYRON, THE SHELLEYS, AND KEATS By Timothy Ruppert March 2008 Dissertation Supervised by Professor Daniel P. -
Tennyson's Poems
Tennyson’s Poems New Textual Parallels R. H. WINNICK To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/944 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. TENNYSON’S POEMS: NEW TEXTUAL PARALLELS Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels R. H. Winnick https://www.openbookpublishers.com Copyright © 2019 by R. H. Winnick This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work provided that attribution is made to the author (but not in any way which suggests that the author endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: R. H. Winnick, Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0161 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/944#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/944#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. -
Images of Masculınıty in Lord Byron's
IMAGES OF MASCULINITY IN LORD BYRON’S TURKISH TALES GÖNÜL BAKAY Bahçeşehir University Abstract : Forms of knowledge regarding masculinity and femininity are socially constructed and discursively constituted. In this sense, cultural productions play an indispensible role in both representing and shaping masculinities. Making use of the insights provided by Deleuze and Guattari, this paper examines performatively constituted masculinities in Lord Byron’s “Turkish Tales”, with particular emphasis on the portrayal of male identity as fluid, metamorphic and capable of multiple possibilities. Representations of masculinity in Byron’s “Turkish Tales” clearly illustrates that masculinity is not a fixed/universal concept, but one that would be better understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming and may vary from one region to another. Keywords : Deleuze and Guattari, Lord Byron, masculinity, orientalism, Turkish Tales. So long as there are battles to be fought, wars to be won, heights to be scaled, hard work to be done, some of us will have to “act like men”. (Gilmore qtd. in Connell 2005:32) Masculinity does not exist except in contrast wih femininity. A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized character types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of European/American culture. (Connell 2005:68) 1. Introduction Representations of masculinity in Byron’s Turkish Tales clearly illustrate that masculinity is not a fixed/universal concept, but one that may vary from one region to another, and would be better understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming.