George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan

Jane Stabler*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

Unlike Romantic epics by Byron's contemporaries - Robert Southey's Madoc, William Blake's Jerusalem, William Wordsworth's The Prelude and John Keats's unfinished Hyperion poems - Don Juan was released volume by volume to its readership, so that consequent changes in Byron's relationship with the English public are foregrounded as a dynamic of the poem. Access to Don Juan is now usually through anthologized extracts, or through editions of Byron's complete works: increasingly, access will be through electronically retrievable texts. In all these cases, we lose the immediate impact that the circumstances of publication made on the poem's first audiences. In all readings of Don Juan, it is vital first of all to recover a sense of where we are in the history of the poem: whether we are reading one of the early cantos published by John Murray, or whether we are joining the poem in Canto VI or later, when Byron had passed over the business of publishing to the Radical John Hunt (who was associated with the Cockney School).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationA Companion to Romanticism
PublisherWiley-Blackwell
Pages267-278
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781405165396
ISBN (Print)9780631198529
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Feb 2008

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