Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's Don Juan: A Marketable Vice (Romanticism in Perspective)

Byron' of Don Juan demonstrates that the pattern of human growth can lead out of, rather than into, the kind of fixed identity that ordinary narrative forms of human recognition seem to require. It is with this end of perpetual self-reinvention and multiplication in mind that I conclude this study. Although many books have studied writers and alcohol in modern American literature, the rich culture of drinking and the many poems and narratives about it in the Romantic period in England have been entirely neglected. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink 1780-1830 is the first study to describe the bulk and variety of writings about drinking to set these poems, novels, essays, letters and journals in a historical, sociological, and medical context to demonstrate the importance of drunkenness in the works of a number of major and minor writers of the period and to suggest that during these years, for a short time, the pleasures and pains of drinking are held in a vivacious balance. The book argues that the figure of the drinker tests the margins of the human being, either as a beast, savage, or thing or, on the other edge of the human range, as a free, inspired spirit In July 1819 London was rocked by the appearance of Don Juan, an 'anonymous[poem by Lord Byron, Europe's most famous author. Over the next five years Byron battled with censors and accusations of immorality to get his greatest poem published. The adventures of Don Juan are the basis for this irreverent satire of Regency society and of the male fantasies that structured public culture in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Charles Donelan looks at Byron's masterpiece as a successful combination of serious literary ambition and outrageous pop culture references. Using Byron's Don Juan style as a guide, he offers modern readers an exciting new theory of nineteenth-century poetry as public fantasy. Don Juan is the most controversial long poem in the canon, and this book is the first to understand it from the point of view of pop culture as a male fantasy "This book focuses on some of the greatest writers and artists of European Romanticism, including S. T. Coleridge, Wordsworth, J. M. W. Turner, Goethe, Holderlin and, in the later nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold. Concluding with a discussion of the significance of Romanticism for our understanding of postmodernity, its various chapters explore the place of the biblical canon as the central element in the shift from the sacred to the secular, and the place of the Bible in the development of our concept of Weltliteratur, or world literature, as definitive of culture. This book will be of interest to all concerned with art, literature and the development of biblical criticism and religious thought."--BOOK JACKET "In July 1819 London was rocked by the appearance of Don Juan, an 'anonymous' poem by Lord Byron, Europe's most famous author. Over the next five years Byron battled with censors and accusations of immorality to get his greatest poem published. The adventures of Don Juan are the basis for this irreverent satire of Regency society and of the male fantasies that structured public culture in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Charles Donelan looks at Byron's masterpiece as a successful combination of serious literary ambition and outrageous pop culture references."--BOOK JACKET. Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction: Romanticism and Vice in an Age of Reaction....Pages 1-30 Learning to Say Juan....Pages 31-67 The Feminization of Male Fantasy: Reimagining Narrative Pleasure in Cantos II and III....Pages 68-89 The Fantasy of Superfluous Heads: from the Harem to the Hydra....Pages 90-120 Mortal Fantasies: the Politics of Scepticism....Pages 121-140 Marriage, Mobility and the Disavowal of Closure....Pages 141-160 Don Juan as a Defence of Liberty....Pages 161-178 Back Matter....Pages 179-195 Don Juan , Byron's best poem, is a sensational radical satire. It uses the legend of Don Juan to expose the male fantasies behind Romanticism and nineteenth-century public culture. Critics feared that the poem was a 'manual for vice' and would corrupt society. Should England's best selling author have been censored? This book looks at how Europe's most famous literary celebrity shows his dark side in Don Juan , a canonical long poem and a pop culture masterpiece.