Aspects of Byron’s Don Juan is, in part, a proceedings volume from the 2012 conference held by the Newstead Byron Society at Nottingham Trent University. Speakers represented in the book include Malcolm Kelsall, Peter Cochran, Diego Saglia and Itsuyo Higashinaka. Topics range from the politics of Don Juan, and its treatment of women, to its comic rhymes. One section is devoted to the poem’s importance in the literatures of Spain and Russia, another to the vast catalogue of Byron’s prose sources (from cannibalism to cookery books), and a final section to the important role played by Mary Shelley in copying most of the poem for the printer. The editor’s introduction describes the enormous literary tradition of which Don Juan forms a vital continuation, from Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, via Rabelais, Cervantes, and Montaigne, to the novelists Sterne, Smollett and Fielding, all of whom Byron adored. Another chapter concerns the differing ways in which Don Juan has been treated by other artists, from Tirso de Molina, via E. T. A. Hoffman, to Johnny Depp.

In this first full-length study of Byron's masterpiece in over thirty years, Richard Cronin boldly presents Don Juan as the epic poem of its age. Impressively illuminating the whole literary nineteenth century through a single work, he asks what kind of epic can be said to represent an era more readily defined by newspapers and magazines than by competitors such as Wordsworth's Excursion or Southey's Joan of Arc arose. Delving into questions of form and choice of hero, he also explores the controversies that informed the poem's reception, its contemporary interactions, and its influence on later nineteenth-century literature. Don Juan, he argues, is the epic poem demanded by an age of cant and dissembling, when people's feelings and the world they lived in had become disconnected. In it, he finds a powerful defence of liberal thinking at a time when that kind of thinking was under threat.

When this book was published in 1945, interest in Byron’s poetry and appreciation of his titanic role in Romanticism had been steadily increasing. Of all his vast poetic production, Don Juan, the last and greatest of his major works, offers the highest rewards to the modern reader. It not only stands out among his poems as the best expression of Byron, but it ranks with the great poems of the nineteenth century as representative of the era, and of modern European civilization. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

First published in 1985. What sort of poem is Don Juan, and how does it maintain its momentum through its long and often struggling narrative? These are the questions that Bernard Beatty proposes in this subtle and elegant discussion of Byron’s masterwork. The legend of Don Juan was entrenched in European literature and other arts long before it came under Byron’s hands, yet Byron’s treatment of the story is often almost unrecognisably far from its forebears. Beatty indicates how deeply Byron has assimilated his predecessors in order to produce his own work. The sustained argument of this book raises questions of interest not only to students of Byron but of comedy in general, as well as of the place of religious motifs in apparently secularised modes.

This book is a thorough, eco-critical re-evaluation of Lord Byron (1789-1824), claiming him as one of the most important ecological poets in the British Romantic tradition. Using political ecology, post-humanist theory, new materialism, and ecological science, the book shows that Byron’s major poems—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the metaphysical dramas, and Don Juan—are deeply engaged with developing a cultural ecology that could account for the co-creative synergies in human and natural systems, and ground an emancipatory ecopolitics and ecopoetics scaled to address globalized human threats to socio-environmental thriving in the post-Waterloo era. In counterpointing Byron’s eco-cosmopolitanism to the localist dwelling praxis advocated by Romantic Lake poets, Byron’s Nature seeks to enlarge our understanding of the extraordinary range, depth, and importance of Romanticism’s inquiry into the meaning of nature and our ethical relation to it.

Don Juan , Byron's best poem, is a sensational radical satire. It uses the legend of Don Juan to expose the male fantasies behind Romanticism and nineteenth-century public culture. Critics feared that the poem was a 'manual for vice' and would corrupt society. Should England's best selling author have been censored? This book looks at how Europe's most famous literary celebrity shows his dark side in Don Juan , a canonical long poem and a pop culture masterpiece.

Byron’s Don Juan is one of the greatest poems in the English language. Byron’s friends initially agreed that ‘it will be impossible to publish this’. Byron prevailed, however, and the first two cantos were issued anonymously after much editorial revision. Even in its revised form, Don Juan was perceived as a radical attack on establishment values; the poem has remained a beacon for freedom of speech and retains its power to shock. Since it was published in 1819–24, all printed editions of the poem have used the text prepared by Byron’s publishers, John Murray and John Hunt. This is the first new text of the poem to be printed in two hundred years. The Longman edition is based on a comprehensive line-by-line analysis of the manuscripts, so the text of the poem follows Byron’s own voice, pace and pauses, rather than the grammatical punctuation and more cautious word choice inserted by his nineteenth-century editors. The Longman Don Juan has been annotated afresh, allowing readers to see where Byron left open the choice of words or rhymes, and demonstrating the extraordinary breadth and depth of his literary allusions, topical and cultural references, and socially coded jokes. Textual annotation includes reception history, extensive bibliographies and a detailed chronology, situating Don Juan in the literary, scientific, dramatic, political, musical and social life of the early nineteenth century. A detailed index to the poem and annotation provides an unparalleled resource for students and scholars.

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.

This volume presents a facsimile of the original draft manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.