Abstract
‘On the day when it shall become accepted as a canon of criticism that the political work and the political opinions of a poet are to weigh nothing in the balance which suspends his reputation — on that day the best part of the fame of Byron will fly up and vanish into air’ (Swinburne 1884 [1911] 75). The aesthete poet Algernon Swinburne’s 1884 pronouncement was prescient. The view that politics was inimical to art dominated the academy for the next hundred years. Modernist inspired ‘new criticism’ of the twentieth century embargoed historical, biographical and sociological contextualism in favour of formalist aesthetics, and found rhetorical verse such as Byron’s particularly vulgar and embarrassing.1 The structuralist and post-structuralist criticism which followed abstracted even further the play of language from its social situation. In Britain and the USA Byron became so marginalized as to be regarded as almost irrelevant to Romantic studies, even though he epitomized Romanticism for continental Europe. His poetry lacked the distilled brevity of the lyrics favoured for teaching, and was not included in the new national curriculum introduced by the Tories in 1988. Yet Byron’s poetry continued to be revered and taught in secondary schools throughout the USSR and the Eastern bloc.
Where history’s pen its praise or blame supplies,
And lies like truth, and still most truly lies.
Lara I, ll. 187–90; CPW III, 220
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works Cited and Suggestions for Further Reading
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and other essays. Trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Bainbridge, Simon. British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Boyd, Elizabeth. Byron’s Don Juan: A Critical Study. New York: The Humanities Press, 1958.
Butler, Marilyn. ‘The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour’. Byron and the Limits of Fiction. Eds Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988. 78–96.
—. ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdom: Byron’s Intellectual Comedy’. Studies in Romanticism 31.3 (1992): 281–94.
Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago, 1979.
Chandler, James K. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Cheeke, Stephen. Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia. Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Chernaik, Warren. Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Christensen, Jerome. Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Clark, Anna. Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Clery, E.J., Caroline Franklin and Peter Garside, eds. Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.
Colebrook, Claire. New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997.
Crompton, Louis. Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth-Century England. London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
Cryle, Peter and Lisa O’Connell, eds. Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Cusset, Catherine. ‘The Lesson of Libertinage’. Libertinage and Modernity. Yale French Studies 94 (1998): 1–17.
DeJean Joan. Libertine Strategies: Freedom and the Novel in Seventeenth-Century France. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1981.
de Staël, Madame. Corinne, or Italy. Trans. Sylvia Raphael; intro. John Isbell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Donelan, Charles. Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron’s Don Juan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Elfenbein, Andrew. Byron and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Eliot, T.S. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
Feher, Michael., ed. The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France. New York: Zone Books, 1997.
Foot, Michael. The Poetry of Politics: A Vindication of Byron. London: Collins, 1988.
Franklin, Caroline. Byron’s Heroines. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
—. ‘Juan’s Sea Changes: Class, Race and Gender in Byron’s Don Juan’. Theory in Practice: Don Juan. Ed. Nigel Wood. Buckingham and Bristol: Open University Press, 1993. 56–89.
—. Byron, a literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
Gilmartin, Kevin. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Graham, Peter W. Don Juan and Regency England. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1990.
Gross, Jonathan. Byron, the Erotic Liberal. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
Haslett, Moyra. Byron’s Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.
Kaplan, Benjamin J. Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht 1578–1620. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1995.
Kelsall, Malcolm. Byron’s Politics. Brighton: Harvester, 1987.
Lansdown, Richard. Byron’s Historical Dramas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Levinson, Marjorie, ed. Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: Chicago and London, 1983.
—. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
—, ed. Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985a.
—. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985b.
—. Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1988.
—. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
—. Byron and Romanticism. Ed. James Soderholm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Medwin, Thomas. Conversations of Lord Byron. Ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Mellor, Anne K. Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Miller, Nancy K. French Dressing: Women, Men and Ancien Régime Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.
More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808). Repr. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995.
Myers, Mitzi. ‘Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books’. Children’s Literature. Eds Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. 31–59.
Pollack, Ellen. ‘Feminism and the New Historicism: A tale of difference or the same old story?’ The Eighteenth Century 29. 3 (1988): 281–6.
Porter, Roy. ‘Libertinism and promiscuity’ in The Don Giovanni Book: Myths of Seduction and Betrayal. Ed. Jonathan Miller. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1–19.
Rigney, Ann. Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Shilstone, Frederick W. Byron and the Myth of Tradition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Siskin, Clifford. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change 1700–1830. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Southgate, Beverley. History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Strachey, Ray. The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain. London: Virago, 1979.
Swinburne, A.C. ‘Wordsworth and Byron’. Nineteenth Century 15 (April, 1884), repr. Miscellanies. London: Chatto and Windus, 1911.
Turner, James Grantham. Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Vassallo, Peter. Byron: The Italian Literary Influence. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984.
Veeser, H. Aram. ed. The New Historicism. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.
Ward, J.A. The Critical Reputation of Byron’s Don Juan in Britain. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. No. 91, Romantic Reassessment. Ed. James Hogg. Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1979.
Watkins, Daniel P. Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987.
—. A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993.
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
Wilkes, Joanne. Lord Byron and Madame de Staël: Born for Opposition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Wilson, Frances, ed. Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
Wolfson, Susan. ‘Couplets, Self, and The Corsair’. Studies in Romanticism 27.4 (1988): 491–513.
—. ‘“Their She Condition”: Cross-Dressing and the politics of gender in Don Juan.’ ELH 58 (Fall 1991): 867–902.
—. Borderlines: The Shifting of Gender in British Romanticism. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2007 Caroline Franklin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Franklin, C. (2007). Byron and History. In: Stabler, J. (eds) Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206106_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206106_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-4593-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-20610-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)