Byronic Hero
The Byronic Hero is a literary archetype characterized by brooding introspection, emotional complexity, and a rebellious, non-conformist nature. Inspired by the poet Lord Byron, this figure often embodies a sense of alienation, a troubled past, and a magnetic, charismatic persona. Byronic Heroes are commonly found in Romantic literature and continue to influence modern portrayals of complex, morally ambiguous characters.
3 Key excerpts on "Byronic Hero"
eBook - ePubLibertine Fashion
Sexual Freedom, Rebellion, and Style
- Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Visual Arts(Publisher)
...Thus the Byronic Hero as it would come to be known is an entity not confined to Byron, but an independent creation. It is also a watershed figure between the late throes of feudalism and the modern hero, the dandy, and the bohemian. Wilson argues that Byron contributed crucial elements to the construction of the bohemian identity, where, even though a actual nobleman, he also represented a the kind of noble “apartness” that the bohemian would cherish: “His style of looks—the marble forehead, the pallor, the sulky mouth and brooding eye—formed the template for effeminate male beauty during the first half of the nineteenth century.” 2 The beauty for which he became famous was as much, if not more, conferred as a result of the carefully controlled and curated representations of him. The image and representation gave rise to a reputation that was as much fabrication as fact, but nevertheless quickly cast a shadow that the “real” Byron would be loath, or find it hard, to escape. Of mythic importance, Byron as fact and as fabrication is a culmination of the notion that we have explored at many intervals so far, namely that the libertine image and style is carefully crafted and curated. As the term suggests, the so-called “Byronic Hero,” although rooted in the poet-hero himself, it is not limited to him. Byron’s influence on the romantic generation of artists, bohemians, libertines, and other men about town was immeasurable, and decisive in cementing the persona—in dress, image, and imagination—for whom creative freedom was inseparable from sexual freedom. And ironically enough, Byron’s example also opens up the queering of libertine identity and style. For although posterity has held tenaciously to the fact that he was a passionate and promiscuous lover of women, he did not confine himself to them...
eBook - ePubThe Haunted Castle
A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism
- Eino Railo(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The stamp of the whole poem is, nevertheless, given to it by the pitiless, cynical analysis which finds nothing sacred or enduring, and in which judgment is passed on the whole of the poet’s age. Such, broadly viewed, is the development of the Byronic Hero as reflected in English literature. 247 We have seen that the type had a distant ancestor and that it passed through a period of crystallization before Scott finally made it widely known and Byron endowed it with its ultimate form and contents. Not until then did its pilgrimage begin through the literature of the rest of Europe, where it raged for long, passing from country to country and sowing everywhere a crop of “pale and interesting” heroes whose foreheads are shadowed by dark curls and in whose eyes gleams a deep world-sorrow. 248...
eBook - ePubByronism, Napoleonism, and Nineteenth-Century Realism
Heroes of Their Own Lives?
- Tristan Donal Burke(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Bourgeois self-narration ultimately rejects Byronic Heroism, which, thus becomes obsolete and is rejected by the bourgeois novel. Finally, I discuss how Byronic Heroism continues to haunt bourgeois heroism with the spectre of revolution. I There have been two comprehensive articles on the influence of Byron on Dickens, William R. Harvey’s ‘Charles Dickens and the Byronic Hero’ and Vincent Newey’s ‘Rival Cultures: Charles Dickens and the Byronic Legacy.’ 2 These can be supplemented by Juliet John’s chapter on Byronic characters in her Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture ; however, this is significantly less attentive to the specificity of Byron’s texts. 3 Harvey traces a series of Byronic characters through Dickens’s later fiction: Steerforth in David Copperfield, James Harthouse in Hard Times, Blandois in Little Dorrit, Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, and Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend, a schema which John broadly reproduces. Newey reflects this whilst also noting more general resonances of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in David Copperfield and Don Juan in Dickens’s later satire, particularly in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. Newey notes that both Harvey and John see Dickens’s writing as oppositional to Byron since Dickens’s Byronic characters represent the kind of ‘Romantic individualism’, involuted, role-playing, self-destructive, antisocial, careless of the external world […], that Dickens ‘despised’, and over against which, either through critique or programmes of redemption, or both, he sets ‘models of moral improvement [ … and] communality.’ (p. 85) Instead, Newey argues for a more complex view of Dickens’s ‘engagement with Byronic romanticism, which, though he must forfeit it in favour of an ethos of solid social virtues, held for him a deep fascination’ (p. 85)...
