Lord Byron's strength : romantic writing and commercial society
According to Jerome Christensen, literary histories of British Romanticism have dealt inadequately with Byron's "lordship"--His singularity as a phenomenal literary success and as the last and greatest aristocratic poet in the language. At first, Byron does not want a poetic career. Then, entrapped by his extraordinary success, he gets one. And once Byron has a career, he ruins it--not by his unsavory sexual practices and political grandstanding, but by publishing his greatest poem. The first extended study of the career and persona of the most celebrated poet of the nineteenth century, Lord Byron's Strength draws on contemporary literary, political, and social theory not only to revise our understanding of Byron but also to reexamine the romanticism of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Hazlitt, and Shelley
Print Book, English, ©1993
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, ©1993
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xxv, 426 pages ; 24 cm
9780801843556, 9780801843563, 0801843553, 0801843561
25164442
1. Theorizing Byron's Practice: The Performance of Lordship and the Poet's Career
2. A Genealogy of Morals: An English Bard, Scotch Reviewers, and a Wicked Uncle
3. Sex, Class, and the Naked Letter of Romance: Childe Harold I and II and the Separation
4. Perversion, Parody, and Cultural Hegemony: The Moment of Change in the Oriental Tales
5. The Speculative Stage: Childe Harold III and the Formation of Byron
6. The Shaping Spirit of Ruin: Childe Harold IV
7. The Circumstantial Gravity of Don Juan
8. Two Dramatic Case Studies: Marino Faliero and Sardanapalus
9. Annals of a Line Undone: What Matters in the English Cantos of Don Juan