McGann, Jerome J., ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World’, in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method & Theory (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 255–93. Don Juan in several superimposed historical frames (narrative, Regency-biographical, publication).
–, Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Important essays, some revised, and some new adventures and reflections.
Manning, Peter J., Byron and His Fictions (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1978)
Marchand, Leslie A., Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). Chapters on Don Juan, pp. 157–234; includes a bibliography.
Martin, Philip W, Byron: A Poet before His Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Byron’s consciousness of, and ambivalence about his audiences, his rivalry with contemporaries.
Ricks, Christopher, ‘Byron’, in Allusion to Poets (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 121–56. Brilliant and canny about Byron’s generous, unanxious ways with literary inheritance.
Rutherford, Andrew, Byron: A Critical Study (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961). Chapters on Don Juan, pp. 123–214.
St Clair, William, ‘The Impact of Byron’s Writings’, in Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Byron: Augustan and Romantic (London: Macmillan, 1990). Working-class interest in Don Juan.
Shilstone, Frederick W., Byron and the Myth of Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988)
Stabler, Jane (ed.), Byron: A Longman Critical Reader (London and New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1998). Critical approaches, by interest and chronology, with introductions to representative essays on Don Juan by McGann, Wolfson, Manning, Barton, Bone (most listed elsewhere in this bibliography).
––, Byron, Poetics and History (London: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Chapters 4 and 5 on Don Juan.
Storey, Mark, Byron and the Eye of Appetite (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986)
Thorslev, Peter L., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962)
Wilkie, Brian, ‘Byron and the Epic of Negation’, in Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), pp. 188–226
Wilson, Francis (ed.), Byromania (London/New York: Macmillan/St Martin’s, 1999). Cultural life and afterlife.
Woodring, Carl, ‘Byron’, in Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 148–229
BOOKS AND ESSAYS ON Don Juan
Barton, Anne, Byron: ‘Don Juan’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
–, ‘Don Juan Transformed’, in Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Byron: Augustan and Romantic (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 68–81
Beatty, Bernard, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1985)
–, ‘Don Juan’ and Other Poems (Penguin Masterstudies) (London: Penguin, 1987)
Boyd, Elizabeth F., Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: A Critical Study (New York: Humanities Press, 1958). Sources, influences, antecedents.
Chandler, James, ‘ “Man fell with apples”: the Moral Mechanics of Don Juan’, in Levine and Keane, Rereading Byron, pp. 67–85
Cooke, Michael G., ‘Byron’s Don Juan: The Obsession and Self-Discipline of Spontaneity’, in Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 217–41
Cooper, Andrew M., ‘Shipwreck and Skepticism: Don Juan, Canto II’, in Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 130–49
de Almeida, Hermione, Byron & Joyce Through Homer: ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Ulysses’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981)
Donelan, Charles, Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: A Marketable Vice (London/New York: Macmillan Press/St Martin’s Press, 2000)
Dyer, Gary, ‘Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites: Being Flash to ‘Don Juan’ PMLA 116 (2001), pp. 562–78. Language, slang, code-talk.
Elledge, Paul W., ‘ “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”: Byron’s Julia and the Instabilities of Valediction’, South Atlantic Review 56:2 (May
1991), PP. 43–57
–, ‘Byron and the Dissociative Imperative: The Example of Don Juan 5’, Studies in Philology 90 (1993), pp. 322–46
–, ‘Never Say(ing) Goodbye: Mediated Valediction in Byron’s Don Juan XI’, Byron Journal 20 (1992), PP. 17–26
–, ‘Sickening Business: Byron’s Juan at Sea’, Criticism 34 (1992), PP. 379–409
Galperin, William H., ‘The Feminization of Don Juan’ in The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 271–82
Graham, Peter W., ‘Don Juan and Regency England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1990)
Haslett, Moyra, Byron’s Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
Johnson, E. D H., ‘Don Juan in England’, ELH 2 (1944), pp. 135–53
Kelsall, Malcolm, ‘The Slave-Woman in the Harem’, Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992), pp. 315–31
Kernan, Alvin B., ‘The Perspective of Satire in Don Juan’, in The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 171–222
Kernberger, Katherine, ‘Power and Sex: The Implication of Role Reversal in Catherine’s Russia’, Byron Journal 8 (1980), pp. 42–9
Lang, Cecil Y., ‘Narcissus Jilted: Byron, Don Juan, and the Biographical Imperative’, in Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Historical Studies and Literary Criticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 143–79
McGann, Jerome J., ‘Don Juan’ in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)
–, ‘Lord Byron’s Twin Opposites of Truth’, in Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 38–64
Manning, Peter J., ‘Don Juan and Byron’s Imperceptiveness to the English Word’, in Reading Romantics (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 115–44
–, ‘Don Juan and the Revisionary Self’, in Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (eds.), Romantic Revisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 210–26
Mellor, Anne K., ‘Don Juan’, in English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 42–76
Rank, Otto, The Don Juan Legend (1924), trans. D. G. Winter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)
Reiman, Donald H., ‘Don Juan in Epic Context’, in Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), PP. 334–43
Richardson, Alan, ‘Escape from the Seraglio: Cultural Transvestism in Don Juan’, in Levine and Keane, Rereading Byron, pp. 175–85
Ridenouer, George M., The Style of ‘Don Juan’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961)
Wolfson, Susan J., ‘ “Their She Condition”: Cross-dressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan’, English Literary History 54 (1987), pp. 585–617; revised as ‘Cross-dressing and the Margins of Gender in Don Juan’, in Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (forthcoming)
Wood, Nigel (ed.), Don Juan: Theory in Practice (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993). Four essays: psychoanalytic readings by Laura Claridge and by David Punter; discussions of class, race and gender by Caroline Franklin and of canivalesque by Philip W. Martin.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES FOR Don Juan
Annual bibliographies, with sections on Byron, are published by the Modern Language Association of America, the Modern Humanities Research Association, the Keats–Shelley Journal, The Romantic Movement and Year’s Work in English Studies.
Chew, Samuel C., and Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., ‘Byron’, in Frank Jordan (ed.), The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism, 3rd edn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1972)
Clubbe, John, ‘George Gordon, Lord Byron’, in Frank Jordan (ed.), The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research an
d Criticism, 4th edn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1985). This report includes a section on bibliographies.
Nicholson, Andrew, ‘Byron’, in Michael O’Neill (ed.), Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Santucho, Oscar José, and Clement Tyson Good, Jr., George Gordon, Lord Byron: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Secondary Materials in English, 1807–1974 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977; 1997, updated through 1994)
Singer, Armand E., The Don Juan Theme, Version and Criticism: A Bibliography (Morgantown: West Virginia University, 1965)
CONCORDANCES AND WEBSITES
Hagelman, Jr., C. W., and R. J. Barnes (eds.), A Concordance to Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967) Coordinated to Steffan and Pratt’s Don Juan.
Don Juan AND BYRON ONLINE
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/7086/donjuan.htm
http://www.infomotions.com/etexts/literature/english/1800–1899/byron-don-315.txt
http://users.compaqnet.be/cn127848/byron/
The Byron Chronology, ed. Anne R. Hawkins: http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/byronchronology/index.html
Byronic Images: Portraits of the Poets, His Family, and Friends: http://www.englishhistory.net/byron/images.html
The International Byron Society (texts, portraits, biography, links, etc.): http://www.internationalbyronsociety.org/
The Life and Work of Lord Byron: http://www.englishhistory.net/byron.html
The Literature Network: Lord Byron: http://www.online-literature.com/byron/
SUSAN J. WOLFSON and PETER J. MANNING
Don Juan
Difficile est proprie communia dicere
Horace, Epistola ad Pisones
Preface to Cantos I and II
In a note or preface (I forget which) by Mr W. Wordsworth
to a poem, the subject of which, as far as it is intelligible, is
the remorse of an unnatural mother for the destruction of a
natural child, the courteous reader is desired to extend his
usual courtesy so far as to suppose that the narrative is
narrated by ‘the captain of a merchantman or small trading
vessel, lately retired upon a small annuity to some inland
town, etc. etc.’ I quote from memory but conceive the above
to be the sense, as far [as] there is sense of the note or preface
10 to the aforesaid poem, as far as it is a poem. The poem or
production to which I allude is that which begins with
‘There is a thorn – it is so old’, and then the poet informs all
who are willing to be informed that it[s] age was such as to
leave great difficulty in the conception of its ever having been
young at all, which is as much as to say either that it was
coeval with the Creator of all things, or that it had been born
old, and was thus appropriately by antithesis devoted to the
commemoration of a child that died young.
The pond near it is described according to mensuration: ‘I
20 measured it from side to side,’Tis three feet long and two feet
wide.’ Let me be excused from being particular in the detail
of such things, as this is the sort of writing which has super
seded and degraded Pope in the eyes of the discerning
British public, and this man is the kind of poet who, in the
same manner that Joanna Southcote found many thousand
people to take her dropsy for God Almighty re-impreg
nated, has found some hundreds of persons to misbelieve in
his insanities, and hold his art as a kind of poetical Emanuel
Swedenborg or Richard Brothers or Parson Tozer, half
30 enthusiast and half impostor. This rustic Gongora and vulgar
Marini of his country’s taste has long abandoned a mind
capable of better things to the production of such trash as
may support the reveries, which he would reduce into a
system of prosaic raving, that is to supersede all that
hitherto by the best and wisest of our fathers has been
deemed poetry.
And for his success – and what mountebank will not find
proselytes (from Count Cagliostro to Madame Krudner) –
he may partly thank his absurdity, and partly his having
40 lent his more downright and unmeasured prose to the aid of
a political party, which acknowledges its real weakness,
though fenced with the whole armour of artificial power
and defended by all the ingenuity of purchased talent, in
liberally rewarding with praise and pay even the meanest of
its advocates. Amongst these last in self-degradation, this
Thraso of poetry has long been a Gnatho in politics, and may
be met in print at some booksellers and several trunkmakers, and in person at dinner at Lord Lonsdale’s.
The reader, who has acquiesced in Mr W. Wordsworth’s
50 supposition that his ‘Misery, oh misery’ is related by the
‘captain of a small etc.’, is requested to suppose by a like
exertion of imagination that the following epic narrative is
told by a Spanish gentleman in a village in the Sierra
Morena on the road between Monasterio and Seville, sitting
at the door of a posada with the Curate of the hamlet on his
right hand, a cigar in his mouth, a jug of Malaga or perhaps
‘right sherris’ before him on a small table, containing the
relics of an olla-podrida. The time, sunset. At some distance
a group of black-eyed peasantry are dancing to the sound of
60 the flute of a Portuguese servant, belonging to two foreign
travellers, who have an hour ago dismounted from their
horses to spend the night on their way to the capital of
Andalusia. Of these, one is attending to the story and the
other, having sauntered further, is watching the beautiful
movements of a tall peasant girl, whose whole soul is in her
eyes and her heart in the dance, of which she is the magnet to
ten thousand feelings that vibrate with her own. Not far off,
a knot of French prisoners are contending with each other at
the grated lattice of their temporary confinement for a view
70 of the twilight festival. The two foremost are a couple of
hussars, one of whom has a bandage on his forehead, yet
stained with the blood of a sabre cut received in the recent
skirmish, which deprived him of his lawless freedom. His
eyes sparkle in unison and his fingers beat time against the
bars of his prison to the sound of the fandango, which is
fleeting before him.
Our friend the storyteller, at some distance with a small
elderly audience, is supposed to tell his story without being
much moved by the musical hilarity at the other end of the
80 village green. The reader is further requested to suppose
him (to account for his knowledge of English) either an
Englishman settled in Spain, or a Spaniard who had travelled
in England, perhaps one of the Liberals who have
subsequently been so liberally rewarded by Ferdinand, of
grateful memory, for his restoration.
Having supposed as much of this as the utter impossibility
of such a supposition will admit, the reader is requested to
extend his supposed power of supposing so far as to conceive
that the dedication to Mr Southey and several stanzas
90 of the poem itself are interpolated by the English editor. He
may also im
agine various causes for the tenor of the dedication.
It may be presumed to be the production of a present
Whig, who after being bred a transubstantial Tory, apostatized
in an unguarded moment, and incensed at having got
nothing by the exchange, has, in utter envy of the better
success of the author of Walter Tyler, vented his renegado
rancour on that immaculate person, for whose future
immortality and present purity we have the best authority in
his own repeated assurances. Or it may be supposed the
100 work of a rival poet, obscured, if not by the present ready
popularity of Mr Southey, yet by the post-obits he has
granted upon posterity and usurious self-applause, in which
he has anticipated with some profusion perhaps the opinion
of future ages, who are always more enlightened than
contemporaries, more especially in the eyes of those whose
figure in their own times has been disproportioned to their
deserts. What Mr Southey’s deserts are no one knows better
than Mr Southey. All his latter writings have displayed the
writhing of a weakly human creature conscious of owing its
110 worldly elevation to its own debasement (like a man who has
made a fortune by the slave-trade, or the retired keeper of a
gaming house or brothel), and struggling convulsively to
deceive others without the power of lying to himself.
But to resume. The dedication may be further supposed to
be produced by someone who may have a cause of aversion
from the said Southey, for some personal reason, perhaps a
gross calumny invented or circulated by this Pantisocratic
apostle of apostasy, who is sometimes as unguarded in his
assertions as atrocious in his conjectures, and feeds the
120 cravings of his wretched vanity; disappointed in its nobler
hopes and reduced to prey upon such snatches of fame as
his contributions to the Quarterly Review, and the consequent
praise, with which a powerful journal repays its
assistants, can afford him – by the abuse of whosoever may
be more consistent or more successful than himself; and the
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