num_pages: 514
description: Based on the old Spanish saga familiar to us through Mozart and Molière, Don Juan is Byron's acknowledged masterpiece. A sixteen-canto satire in ottava rima, it recounts the seductions and betrayals, mishaps and adventures of the rakish Spanish grandee. Byron's "plan was to have no plan" but to "unpack his heart" in the person of his hero. By hos own account he meant to be "quietly facetious about everything," and he used the epic to satirize English life, customs, manners, and morals. But beneath the satiric impulse was a hatred of hypocrisy and a consciousness of the power of illusion. If Childe Harold, as Louis Kronenberger remarks in his introduction, "is in large part Byronism," Don Juan "is Byron." Romantic, irreverent, exuberant and entertaining, it is a "hymn to the earth," but also a human sequence to "its own music chaunted.""There is something for us to learn from the courage and buoyancy with which Byron came to terms with a world as shabby and confused as ours."--Dame Helen Gardner
language: English
title: Don Juan
titlecomplete: Don Juan
characters: Lambros Katzonis, Don Juan
genres: Literature, Classics, English Literature, Classic Literature, 19th Century, Fiction, Poetry, Romanticism, Epic, British Literature
ratings_count: 8293
publisher: Modern Library