Literature
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.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
7 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 - ePubByronism, Napoleonism, and Nineteenth-Century Realism
Heroes of Their Own Lives?
- Tristan Donal Burke(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
For Callaghan, Byron ‘[l]iberat[es] heroes from their conventional epic context’ but is also ‘alive to the dangerous slippage possible from the solitary poet- hero’s self-mastery and its tyrannous possibilities.’ He ‘exposed his poet-heroes to his audience’s doubt, courting both the reader’s enchantment by such power and rejection of its misuse.’ 45 These contradictions continue to play out in his novelistic afterlife. Thus, the connection between the Byronic and the transcendental homelessness of the novel in Lukács’s Theory of the Novel is stressed by Deborah Lutz in her wonderful book The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. 46 However, whereas I read the Byronic Hero’s novelistic afterlife as essentially negative, the prototype for a hollowed-out bourgeois subjectivity, Lutz argues for the character’s redemptive potential: the possibility of redemption for Byronic dislocation is, of course, finding a home in the beloved. Byron’s unique manifestation of the myth of the wandering and outcast hero brings homelessness into a narrative of love by delineating it as a melancholy chaos that might possibly be ordered or bounded through a second self. 47 Strikingly, Lutz traces this redemptive capacity through the work of the Brontë sisters, and into the mass-market romance novel. There is a ‘much-hidden dialogue that exists between the most difficult and important continental philosophers and the most formulaic of female-coded genres,’ which produces ‘an aesthetic based on women’s desires and pleasures […] as a basis for understanding contemporary constructions of subjectivity.’ 48 Lutz’s sees this as a process of liberation
eBook - PDFHeroes and Heroism in British Fiction Since 1800
Case Studies
- Barbara Korte, Stefanie Lethbridge, Barbara Korte, Stefanie Lethbridge(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Milton’s Satan provided one of the models for this rebellious heroic stance. The anti- social, ‘dark’ and ambivalent Byronic Hero is an extreme manifestation of this concept, but he was anticipated by the hero-villain of gothic fic- tion who also reintroduced the supernatural to the heroic (Anderson, 1982). It is also, however, a piece of gothic fiction—significantly written by a woman—that severely critiqued the romantic hero and his grandiose transgressions of the social and moral order: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The romantic hero continued to fascinate the Victorians (includ- ing Thomas Carlyle), but he remains essentially a fantasy, an option of the lost past or of exotic places (like the far-away places of the British Empire), displaced in time or space, a dream and in this sense an ideal, but only in exceptional moments a reality. However, there were also legacies from Romanticism that the Victorians could put to good use. The Napoleonic Wars had not only created heroes 14 B. KORTE AND S. LETHBRIDGE in real life—including a half-guilty fascination with Napoleon. In their context heroes in fiction took on renewed relevance as patriotic and national leader figures. Thus the celebration of heroic Richard Coeur de Lion and his merry order of knights, including the folk hero Robin Hood, in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) helped to (re-)invent a chivalric tradition charged with national significance. Scott utilised the nationalistic impetus of the heroic even more emphatically in his Scottish novels, for instance in Rob Roy (1817), and he remained an extremely popular author through- out the nineteenth century. Even where nationalism and patriotism were not directly evoked, the Victorians showed a marked preference for heroes that enabled social participation and contributed to community-building at a time when their country was faced with large-scale transformations inside its borders, and a centrifugal spread of its empire outside.
eBook - PDFRadical Orientalism
Rights, Reform, and Romanticism
- Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
In the most general terms, then, the Turkish tales modeled an indi- vidualism that publicly affronted established authority. Byron’s fictional transgressors resonated in large part because the poetic idol who penned them was recognized in his creations. One Byron-hater puts the biographi- cal impetus in these terms: “Childe! Giaour! and Corsair! – names by which men call/ Bad copies of a worse original.” 106 Similarly, another anti-Byronic diatribe invokes the celebrity “renegade” in describing how he “became a name/ Applauded by the trump of Fame” who would regret abandoning his kind: “though each joy appear around,/ Though ev’ry human bliss be found,/ There is a gnawing fiend within,/ The constant follower of sin.” 107 Such moralizing descriptions of Byron and his literary subjects reveal how the poet’s contemporary “Fame” magnified the ideological import of his imagined infidelities. 108 Readers could not and would not disentangle their interpretation of his heroes’ struggles against convention from Byron’s pub- lic reputation as a social scofflaw. His characters were and continue to be read personally in a way few other authors can claim. Byron frequently complained of this critical commonplace, as when he responded to a scathing review of Don Juan. He argued that his “case as an Author is peculiarly hard” because, unlike Walter Scott, he is “everlastingly taken or mistaken for [his] own Protagonist.” 109 Yet while disputing this reading, he acknowledged he was an insurgent in the same stamp as his heroes. Citing Madame de Sta¨ el’s admonition that he “should not have warred with the World – it will not do – it is too strong always for an individual” (97), Byron counters that “the World had done me the honour to begin the war; and assuredly if peace is only to be obtained by courting and paying tribute to it; I am not qualified to obtain it’s [sic] countenance” (97).
- M. Schneider(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Pushing the freedom to imagine to its farthest logical extreme leads to the transcendentalist conclusion that the body is either superfluous or an impediment to ultimate self-realization. H a r r i s o n a n d B y r o n i c I n - B e t w e e n - n e s s 113 Of the second-generation Romantics, Byron felt the pain of this existential dilemma most keenly. The figure of the Byronic Hero, a persona formulated first as a poetic character and later enacted by Byron in his life, is a Satanic violator of all standards of decent civic and familial duty. But this way of life was the effect, not the cause, of his in-between-ness. Tantalized by the idealistic dreams his imagination was capable of weaving, but held fast in place by the brute fact of his physicality, Byron—“alike unfit to sink or soar”— alternated in his works between two modes of responding to this no-win existential situation. Byron’s poetry is either tender or tough. In the tender works—such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and con- fessional lyrics like “When we two parted,” “Stanzas to Augusta,” and “Maid of Athens, ere we part,” Byron related his joys and, more often, his sorrows with touching genuineness and simplicity, as if the pain in his soul could only be ameliorated by honest expression. The tough mode is equally expressive of pain and longing, though those feelings are hidden under a mask of forced playfulness. In the tough works, Byron expresses himself with mockery and sarcasm. Though Byron employed this mode of composition throughout his career, it was most spectacularly pursued and realized in Don Juan, a long, mock-heroic send-up of everything from “ladies intellectual” to can- nibalism in an open boat.
- Sarah Wootton(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Byron, in this instance, offers solace and a safeguard against what Eliot herself judges to be an ‘almost unpar- donably egotistical letter’. That Eliot should look to Byron for moral fibre borders on the ironic, but it also demonstrates a finely tuned appreciation of his poetic strengths and resilience. Some 15 years later, she defends Byron in her attack on Dr Cumming’s ‘Evangelical Teaching’: Who that has a spark of generous feeling, that rejoices in the pres- ence of good in a fellow-being, has not dwelt with pleasure on the thought that Lord Byron’s unhappy career was ennobled and puri- fied towards its close by a high and sympathetic purpose, by honest and energetic efforts for his fellow-men? Who has not read with deep emotion those last pathetic lines, beautiful as the afterglow of sunset, in which love and resignation are mingled with something 134 Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing of a melancholy heroism? Who has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi—the sufferer’s inability to make his farewell messages of love intelligible, and the last long hours of silent pain? 37 Byron is here a poet of affecting verse, noble feelings, and selfless acts, the antithesis of the ‘vulgar-minded genius’ that would be tainted by the Stowe scandal. His poetry pulsates with a ‘generous feeling’ that, at the last, strives for the common good of mankind, echoing Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s earlier lament for the poet of liberty in Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron (1824): ‘That generous heart where genius thrill’d divine,/ Hath spent its last most glorious throb for thee—/ Then sank amid the storm that made thy children free!’ (ll. 16–18). 38 The pathos of what Eliot refers to as his ‘melancholy heroism’, combined with ‘a high and sympathetic purpose’ – namely Byron’s involvement in the Greek War of Independence – comes very close to the figure of the Romantic artist- reformer that assumes prominence in Eliot’s fiction.
- E. Eisner(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Robinson plays on this not to withdraw the self from the reader by disguising it as staged character, but to induce an emotional response: she asks her reader to sympathize and to purchase, to feel and to buy. Such a conjunction is underlined by the commendation that closes a mostly positive review of Robinson’s Poems (1791): “The work is elegantly printed on superfine paper, exhibits a numerous list of subscribers Systems of Literary Lionism 23 from the first ranks of title and fashion, and is decorated with a cop- per-plate of the fair author, from an original painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds.” 14 Anticipating one part of the appeal of Byronic celebrity, Robinson’s reviewer makes it impossible to separate fashionable celebrity from literary value, the seductiveness of the material book from the seductiveness of the writer’s person. If Byronic celebrity is anticipated by careers such as Robinson’s, however, the phenomenon of Byron also transformed what literary celebrity could mean, refashioning both the poet as public figure and poetry’s publics. With an aura of transgression licensed and height- ened by his nobility and his facility with classic literary codes, Byron exercised a new kind of charismatic sway over enthralled readers fascinated by the blending of his poetry and his personality. 15 Byron changes the terms of celebrity not only because of the sheer scale of his commanding popularity but also because of the intensity of the transferential relationship that develops between the public and the poet, the deep and complicated involvement of each in the emo- tional life of the other.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
