Lord Byron - AAALA007A
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George Gordon, Lord Byron is an icon of the Romantic age, and one of the most influential literary figures of the nineteenth century. This course offers students the opportunity to study Byron’s key works in depth, in the contexts of both their historical/literary impact and their subsequent critical reception. The course will follow Byron’s development as a writer from the convention-breaking first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage through to Byron’s comic revision of epic tradition in Don Juan. It will trace the evolution of the Byronic Hero (from exile to rebel, murderer and proto-vampire), Byron’s radical recasting of a range of narrative, lyric and dramatic forms, and his exploration of themes such as the Promethean defiance of authority, liberty and libertinism, gender, sexual transgression, predestination and the nature of sin. The course will also focus on Byron’s poetic responses to, and representations of, contemporary historical events, travel (particularly to Greece, Switzerland and Italy) and personal scandal ‒ as well as his own debauchery, international celebrity and exile ‒ and his construction, through these, of the powerful, charismatic, cosmopolitan, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Byronic persona whose legacy is very much present in contemporary popular culture and iconography.
Aims: To introduce students to a wide range of influential poetic texts by Byron. To trace Byron’s central thematic preoccupations and his exploration of these across his writing career. To develop students’ appreciation of Byron’s formal inventiveness, and the motives for this, across a range of poetic forms and genres. To introduce students to Byron’s significance in British and European culture in the nineteenth century. To introduce students to some of the controversies and critical debates that have surrounded Byron’s life and work since the publication of his earliest poems. Assessment: Credits will be given on the basis of students’ short presentations, their regular participation in seminar discussion and a final essay (2500 words) whose topic needs to be discussed with the instructor. MA students who wish to sign up for the graded paper (AAALA007B) will submit one long essay of 3500-4000 words to receive their course credits & graded paper credits. An outline with a brief bibliography for the long essay needs to be submitted & discussed with the instructor. Erasmus students will receive their grade for their seminar work and a regular credit essay (2500 words). Syllabus The syllabus is available on Moodle: https://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=3491. Most of the texts can be comfortably read in a week, but you should try to read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the selected cantos of Don Juan in advance. The recommended printed editions are Jerome McGann (ed.), Byron: The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning (eds), Lord Byron: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1996). Some recommended secondary reading and a list of online resources follows the syllabus below: Recommended Secondary Reading (available on Moodle): Angeletti, Gioia. ‘“I Feel the Improvisatore”: Byron, Improvisation, and Romantic Poetics’, in Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia (eds), British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (Rodopi, 2005), 165-80. Beatty, Bernard, Byron's Don Juan and Other Poems (Penguin, 1987) Beatty and Gleckner (eds), The Plays of Lord Byron: Critical Essays (LUP, 1997) – selected essays Bone, Drummond (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron (CUP, 2004) Bone, Drummond, ‘Don Juan, Cantos I–IV’, in Shears and Rawes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (OUP, 2024), 124–139. Crisafulli, Lilla Maria. ‘Byron in Transit: Italy in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV and Beppo’, in Shears and Rawes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (OUP, 2024), 93-108. Halmi, Nicholas. ‘The Literature of Italy in Byron’s Poems of 1817-20’, in Rawes and Saglia (eds), Byron and Italy (MUP, 2017), 23-43. (https://books.openedition.org/obp/19633?lang=en) Horová, Mirka, ´The Metaphysical Dramas: Playing against All Odds´, in Shears and Rawes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (OUP, 2024), 187-202. Minta, Stephen ‘The Landscapes of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I and II’, in Shears and Rawes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (OUP, 2024), 18–32. Saglia, Diego, ‘Don Juan in the Ottoman East Dis/Continuities in Cantos V–VIII’, in Shears and Rawes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (OUP, 2024), 140–154. Sandy, Mark. ‘“Thy Wreck a Glory”: Venice, Subjectivity, and Temporality in Byron and Shelley and the Post-Romantic Imagination’, in Laniel-Musitelli and Sabiron (eds), Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities (Open Books, 2021), 205-24 (https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0232/ch10.xhtml) Shaw, Phillip, ‘Exile and Sublimity: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III, the Separation Poems, and “Darkness”’, in Shears and Rawes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (OUP, 2024), 79-92. Stabler, Jane, (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) – selected essays Ward, Matthew, ‘Byron’s Poetic Endings: The Deformed Transformed, The Vision of Judgment, The Island, and “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”’, in Shears and Rawes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron (OUP, 2024), 203–217. Online Resources: CHP http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5131/5131-h/5131-h.htm#link2H_4_0006 The Corsair http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21811/21811-h/21811-h.htm Manfred, Beppo http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20158/20158-h/20158-h.htm Don Juan http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm#2H_4_0018 Cain, The Island http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23475/23475-h/23475-h.htm Last update: HOROM0AF (18.09.2025)
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