scholarly journals Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Douglass

Abstract Lord Byron took a highly ambivalent attitude toward female authorship, and yet his poetry, letters, and journals exhibit many proofs of the power of women’s language and perceptions. He responded to, borrowed from, and adapted parts of the works of Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Lee, Madame de Staël, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, Joanna Baillie, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Dacre. The influence of women writers on his career may also be seen in the development of the female (and male) characters in his narrative poetry and drama. This essay focuses on the influence upon Byron of Lee, Inchbald, Staël, Dacre, and Lamb, and secondarily on Byron’s response to intellectual women like Lady Oxford, Lady Melbourne, as well as the works of male writers, such as Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth, who affected his portrayal of the genders.

Author(s):  
William H. Galperin

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.


2002 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Diego Saglia

Legends and tales of Islamic Granada were among the most frequently re-elaborated exotic subjects in British Romantic literature. A popular theme in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Spanish Orientalism attracted both famous writers such as Lord Byron, Joanna Baillie, Washington Irving, Felicia Hemans or Letitia Landon, and less familiar ones such as Lord Porchester, George Moir and Lady Dacre. This essay concentrates on one component of the myth of Granada which enjoyed great diffusion in Romantic-period literature, the tale of the Moor's Last Sigh and the tears shed by the last Muslim monarch on leaving his capital forever after the Christian conquest in 1492. The aim is to illustrate how, in migrating from its original context, this tale comes to signify and emblematize issues of gender and notions of history as progress specific to British culture. The poetic texts examined here employ the Spanish-Orientalist myth to elaborate ideas of masculinity and femininity, as well as reflections on power and its extinction, the fall of empires and the emergence of new states. Thus King Boabdil's tears were exotically popular also because they were removed from their original meaning and import, and refashioned into vehicles for ideological concerns proper to British Romantic-period culture


Author(s):  
Christoph Bode

Abstract This essay examines how subjective identities are discursively constructed in William Blake and P.B. Shelley, making brief references to William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith. It is argued that, although the poets come up with strikingly divergent solutions to the challenge of self-modelling, they face the same fundamental problems of self-grounding, working as they do within the paradox-prone paradigm of a Romantic self that tries to constitute itself out of itself. Comparing these Romantic poets with twentieth-century poetic models of selfhood and identity in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, this essay provides a tentative answer to the question of whether we continue to operate within the Romantic framework of discursive self-construction or whether in fact we have moved beyond this mode of self-construction.


Author(s):  
Steve Zeitlin

In this chapter, the author recalls how his family would spend afternoons and evenings reading poems on the screened porch overlooking the sand dunes, the beach, and the sea in a rented house in Garden City, South Carolina. His father-in-law, Lucas, eagerly anticipates those times, bringing along his 101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But they all bring a few poems to the porch—even the children. At age ten their nephew Aidan Powers came equipped with a full set of Shel Silverstein's ingenious poetry. Masterpieces and ditties are treated with equal weight: poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron are interspersed with children's poetry and nonsense verses. The evenings of poetry reading on the porch at the beach were so enjoyed by the family that they spawned poetry nights in the Dargan living room back in Darlington, South Carolina, on a weekly basis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 66-74
Author(s):  
Mr Amit

This paper examines about Romanticism or Romantic era, themes and some famous writers, poets and poems of romantic era. Romanticism is one of the repetitive topics that are connected to either creative mind, vision, motivation, instinct, or independence. The subject frequently condemns the past, worries upon reasonableness, disconnection of the essayist and pays tribute to nature. Gone before by Enlightenment, Romanticism brought crisp verse as well as extraordinary books in English Literature. Begun from England and spread all through Europe including the United States, the Romantic development incorporates well known journalists, for example, William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lord Byron, Shelley, Chatterton, and Hawthorne. ‘Romantic’ has been adjusted from the French word romaunt that implies a story of Chivalry. After two German scholars Schlegel siblings utilized this word for verse, it changed into a development like an epidemic and spread all through Europe. Romanticism in English writing started during the 1790s with the distribution of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's "Preface" to the subsequent version (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he portrayed verse as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", turned into the statement of the English Romantic development in verse. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was set apart by advancements in both substance and artistic style and by a distraction with the mysterious, the intuitive and the heavenly. An abundance of abilities, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. what's more, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, have a place with this first phase. The second phase of Romanticism, involving the period from around 1805 to the 1830s, was set apart by a reviving of social patriotism and another regard for national roots, as bore witness to by the accumulation and impersonation of local old stories, people songs and verse, society move and music, and even recently disregarded medieval and Renaissance works. The resuscitated recorded  appreciation was converted into creative composition by Sir Walter Scott, who is frequently considered to have imagined the verifiable novel. At about this equivalent time English Romantic verse had arrived at its peak in progress of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.


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