Byron and the Victorians

Literary-historical account of Byron's influence on Victorian writers, concentrating on class and sexuality.

Andrew Elfenbein (Author)

9780521607087, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 July 2004

300 pages
22.9 x 15.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.455 kg

"...an impressive study..." Robert F. Gleckner, The Wordworth Circle

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]