Byron's Heroines

ISBN-13: 9780198112303 / Angielski / Twarda / 1992 / 296 str.

Dr Caroline Franklin

Opis

"Alas the love of women it is known/ To be a lovely and fearful thing " (Don Juan, st. 199) Traditionally seen as an archetypal masculine poet, better known for his relationships with women than for the sympathetic study of them, Lord Byron has not lent himself easily to a feminist critique. In this, the first such example, Caroline Franklin takes an original and polemical standpoint, reading Byron within the setting of the contemporary debate on the nature, role, and rights of women in society. The heroines of Byron's narrative and dramatic verse are considered, not from a biographical perspective, but by relating these representations to ideologies of sexual difference which held in the poet's day. Viewed in their literary-historical context, these Byronic heroines are compared with other female protagonists of the age, thereby revealing the poet to be unusually honest and bold in his portrayal of female sexuality and its relation to political issues.

Recenzje

Byron's Heroines has combined an intellectual history of gender in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a new look at Byron as a writer of considerable learning, imagination, and scope. ... Byronists and feminists will read this good book - yet its chief audience ought to be those who still question Byron's standing as a great writer and his contribution to that fallible composite that we call Western humanism.