Book contents
- Byron’s Don Juan
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Byron’s Don Juan
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 My Poem’s Epic
- Chapter 2 I Want a Hero
- Chapter 3 Especially upon a Printed Page
- Chapter 4 The Gate of Life and Death
- Chapter 5 Allusions Private and Inglorious
- Chapter 6 Taking Another Tack
- Chapter 7 Mine Irregularity of Chime
- Chapter 8 This Is a Liberal Age
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Chapter 2 - I Want a Hero
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2023
- Byron’s Don Juan
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Byron’s Don Juan
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 My Poem’s Epic
- Chapter 2 I Want a Hero
- Chapter 3 Especially upon a Printed Page
- Chapter 4 The Gate of Life and Death
- Chapter 5 Allusions Private and Inglorious
- Chapter 6 Taking Another Tack
- Chapter 7 Mine Irregularity of Chime
- Chapter 8 This Is a Liberal Age
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Summary
Chapter 2 presents Don Juan as an anti-heroic epic. The poem begins, ‘I want a hero,’ and it ends still in the same predicament, because Don Juan, the figure from the pantomime that Byron selects for his hero, so signally fails to fulfil that role. In Don Juan, I argue, Byron chooses a hero who fails to dominate his own poem, a hero who is always finding himself pushed to the sidelines of his own story, and that paradoxically is one of the conditions of his poem’s enormous success.
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- Byron's Don JuanThe Liberal Epic of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 36 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023