The Cambridge introduction to Byron
By: Richard Lansdown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge
Language: eng
Number of pages: 172
ISBN-13: 9780521111331; 9780521128735
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Description: "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"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Preface; 1. Life; 2. Context; 3. The letters and journals; 4. The Poet as pilgrim; 5. The Orient and the outcast; 6. Four philosophical tales; 7. Histories and mysteries; 8. Don Juan; 9. Afterword.