Byron and the Victorians: 4 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 4)
Cambridge University Press, 3/30/1995
EAN 9780521454520, ISBN10: 0521454522
Hardcover, 300 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
This book is the first full-length study of Byron's influence on Victorian writers, concentrating on Carlyle, Emily Brontë, Tennyson, Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, and Wilde. It has two emphases, theoretical and literary-historical. Its theoretical project is to revise earlier understanding of literary influence through a demonstration of the ways that institutions of cultural production mediate the access that later writers have to earlier ones. Its literary-historical project is to suggest the many different responses that Victorian writers had to Byron and to his celebrity in British culture. It argues that defining oneself against Byron became a ritual of the Victorian authorial career. Victorian writers did not reject Byron outright: instead, they defined themselves through fictions of personal development away from values associated with Byron towards those associated with themselves as mature Victorian writers.
Introduction
1. Byron and the secret self
2. The creation of Byronism
3. Carlyle, Byronism, and the professional intellectual
4. Byron at the margins
Emily Brontë and the fate of Milo
5. The flight from vulgarity
Tennyson and Byron
6. The shady side of the sword
Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, Wilde, and Byron's homosexuality
Afterword.