Kirjahaku

Byron's poetic reputation has been established in his comic epic Don Juan and its cognates Beppo and The Vision of Judgment. Poems lying outside this group are still regarded with some uncertainty. This study demonstrates that some of Byron's most deeply held critical and political convictions - but also certain aspects of his experience over which he had comparatively little conscious control - found expression in his historical dramas of 1820-21: Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari. In these plays we find Byron responding with the fullest degree of imaginative intelligence to his work on the management subcommittee at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the background to which is given its most extensive treatment yet; to his involvement with the Italian nationalist movement; to his advocacy of neo-classical dramatic form and above all to his understanding of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's reputation among Romantic critics. In this pioneering study Richard Lansdown sheds fresh critical and biographical light on Byron's contribution to the theatre, which will be of great interest to many studying the Romantics.

This book extends our understanding of Lord Byron's poetry--as opposed to his life and legend--by offering fifty very short discussions of his best poems, be they lyrics, four cantos of poetic travelogue in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, narrative poems set in the Middle East and elsewhere, dramas (neoclassical, Faustian, or Biblical), satires, love songs, or the seventeen cantos of his comic epic, Don Juan. The coverage is wide, from the very beginning of Byron's career in Nottinghamshire to its very end in Greece, and the approach is accessible, giving readers something to think about rather than telling them what to think, without 'explaining poems away'. The focus is sometimes biographical, sometimes historical, sometimes generic, sometimes formalist, but always the texts are chosen on the basis of their quality, first and foremost. The book is designed to be dipped into, or read from cover to cover, as the reader prefers--and, of course, the choice of Byron's fifty best things will itself promote discussion of a poet who deserves to stand just behind Shakespeare alongside Chaucer, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth as one of the central figures in English verse.

Author of the most influential long poem of its era (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) and the funniest long poem in European literature (Don Juan), Lord Byron was also the literary superstar of Romanticism, whose effect on nineteenth-century writers, artists, musicians and politicians - but also everyday readers - was second to none. His poems seduced and scandalized readers, and his life and legend were correspondingly magnetic, given added force by his early death in the Greek War of Independence. This introduction compresses his extraordinary life to manageable proportions and gives readers a firm set of contexts in the politics, warfare, and Romantic ideology of Byron's era. It offers a guide to the main themes in his wide-ranging oeuvre, from the early poems that made him famous (and infamous) overnight, to his narrative tales, dramas and the comic epic left incomplete at his death.

Author of the most influential long poem of its era (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) and the funniest long poem in European literature (Don Juan), Lord Byron was also the literary superstar of Romanticism, whose effect on nineteenth-century writers, artists, musicians and politicians - but also everyday readers - was second to none. His poems seduced and scandalized readers, and his life and legend were correspondingly magnetic, given added force by his early death in the Greek War of Independence. This introduction compresses his extraordinary life to manageable proportions and gives readers a firm set of contexts in the politics, warfare, and Romantic ideology of Byron's era. It offers a guide to the main themes in his wide-ranging oeuvre, from the early poems that made him famous (and infamous) overnight, to his narrative tales, dramas and the comic epic left incomplete at his death.