Byron's othered self and voice
Subtitle: contextualizing the homographic signature
By: Abigail F. Keegan.
Series: Studies in nineteenth-century British literature,; v. 21
Publisher: Peter Lang
Published: 2003
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 162
Subjects: Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824 -- Criticism and interpretation; Homosexuality and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century; Difference (Psychology) in literature; Homosexuality, Male, in literature; Sexual orientation in literature; Self in literature; Sex in literature
Description: "By analyzing the English Romantic Era's masculine gender norms as a set of contrasts between a heterosexual "norm" and a sodomitic "other,' this book isolates four tropes that distinguish the sodomite: criminality, silence, effeminacy, and foreignness. These tropes are then traced through Byron's early poetry, the first two cantos of Childe Harold and the popular Oriental tales, demonstrating the ways the Byronic persona and the Byronic hero are deeply indebted to the conflicted sites of homosexual meaning in the Romantic age.

Discussions of legal and literary cases, as well as attention to the political implications of heterosexuality as an ideal created to serve a (re)productive ideology of empire, make this study of interest not only to Romantic scholars, but also to scholars of gender theory, history, and postcolonial studies."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [149]-156).
Table of contents: title: Abject figures and subversion; title: Byron's poetics : Permutations of silence; title: Sodomy, rhetoric, and pre-texts to Childe Harold; title: The sexual outlaw : The Giaour; title: Disturbing gender : The Bride of Abydos; title: The Corsair : a pirate and a homicidal woman; title: Disrupting sexual difference; title: Coming to terms : Lara, the effeminate page, and queer.