Radicalism in Byron‘s Manfred: A Politico-religious Study

Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2011

This paper offers a politico-religious reading of Manfred that demonstrates how the Byronic hero is shown as the symbol of rebellion against the tyrannical government and its institutions. The paper traces the movement from symbolic presentation to Byron’s rejection of resigning to supernatural powers. Byron accused his own country-men of arraying their strength in the side of tyranny and stated that freedom could be possible when the powerful obstacles, thrones and courts were removed. Ultimately the paper aims at exploring all possible political meanings of the play in the light of Byron’s political and religious beliefs.

Composition history and Byron's intentions, characteristics and nature of the Byronic hero (with examples from 19th century literature and 20th century pop culture, as well as pre-Byron predecessors), and the parallels and differences between Manfred and Nietzsche's superman.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Byron's 'Manfred' on the basis of a descriptive phenomenology that opens up a new approach to the verse drama. This paper is concerned with the literary significance of a traumatic event that has aesthetic, textual and ethical implications. I argue that Manfred’s character announces the thematic of the un-presentable through the vehicle of the sublime, but that Byron’s poetry deprives time and memory of their synthetic functions, so that 'Manfred' as a verse drama is concerned with an ethical crisis that displaces available models of rational autonomy

Using Jerome J. McGann’s suggestion that the earliest fragments of "Manfred" might have been written during his Levantine Tour (c 2 July 1809 – 14 July 1811), this study aims to offer a new perspective on Byron’s "Manfred", taking into account issues inherent in Byron’s patrician upbringing, his experience of Ottoman Greece, his notion of a Classical tradition, and his previous Byronic heroes. The majority of motifs previously perceived as “Gothic” can thus be seen in a new light, namely, as “Greek”. The Introduction to my study surveys the Greek imaginary, its historical dissemination, its respective appropriations by the Roman Empire and by North-Western Europeans, especially by British Whigs, and its legacy within British poetry, especially regarding the description of mountain landscapes. Aiming to facilitate an insight into Byron’s formative experiences, the chapter offers a survey of eighteenth-century Philhellenism and its socio-political conditions, namely the institution of the Grand Tour, burgeoning Orientalism, Winckelmann's aesthetic reassessment of the plastic arts (followed by the trends of antiquarianism and the picturesque in British painting) and the French Revolution. Here, I draw an ideological and aesthetic distinction between the Greek imaginary and Gothicism and then I outline Byron's Greek imaginary.

2010

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2017

“This Visible World” examines Byron’s use of a stationary style of visual description akin to that of a painting, to craft a literary persona in Manfred that harnesses the natural effects of the weather and environment to amplify the emotional strain of the titular character. His suffering leads to a form of cathartic release from melancholic calcification. Using Timothy Morton’s essay on Manfred and ecology, “Byron’s Manfred and Ecocriticism, ” more specifically, his analysis on the work of John Martin’s Manfred on the Jungfrau (1837), in conjunction with an analysis of Martin’s Manfred and the Witch of the Alps (1837), I examine Act I, Scene II of the work, in which Manfred is situated on the edge of a vast cliff, seemingly contemplating his own suicide, and the relationship between the character and nature. This relationship is further analyzed through a close look at Martin’s Manfred and the Witch of the Alps, as there is a spiritual copy of Manfred next to the character in Martin’s painting. This “copy” stands as a visual representation of Byron himself, who uses Manfred, what I call an avatar, as a means of transportation, guiding a recreation of himself as his reader would have viewed him at the that time. I examine these paintings and articles to develop my discussion of Byron’s use of an avatar to mediate his treatment of nature in the play.

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2011

The quest for liberty in Lord Byron's poetry is a polemical issue because most critics have termed it nihilistic and satanic simply because the poet and his protagonists question Christian revelation and man-made laws. This article sets out to show that although Lord Byron and the Byronic hero as can be seen in the different poems do question Christian revelation and flout a number of generally accepted moral values, they do so in an attempt to find answers, which might help the individual to understand the universe, and be of help to the rest of mankind. The desire for liberty becomes the basic inspirational force, where conflict and warfare are justifiable pathways to the desired end. This paper also looks at the quest for liberty in Byron's poetry from the perspective of the heroes' ideals, justified by human nature and references to mythical rebels. Contrary to the generally accepted critical opinion that Lord Byron's quest for liberty is essentially egocentric, this article seeks to show that the quest for liberty is the Byronic creed and the only constant element in the poet's ambiguous life alongside the detestation of cant. The article argues that the Byronic hero's deconstruction of philosophical and sociopolitical ideals does not result from the poetic persona's lawlessness as generally assumed, but from an innate justifiable call for change, first for the individual and then for the common good. Related to his search for liberty, there are a lot of polemical issues around Byron's notion of the ideal, which are partly addressed in this paper.

2012

Author of the most influential long poem of its era (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) and the funniest long poem in European literature (Don Juan), Lord Byron was also the literary superstar of Romanticism, whose effect on nineteenth-century writers, artists, musicians and politiciansbut also everyday readers-was second to none. His poems seduced and scandalized readers, and his life and legend were correspondingly magnetic, given added force by his early death in the Greek War of Independence. This introduction compresses his extraordinary life to manageable proportions, and gives readers a firm set of contexts in the politics, warfare and Romantic ideology of Byron's era. It offers a guide to the main themes in his wide-ranging oeuvre, from the early poems that made him famous (and infamous) overnight, to his narrative tales, dramas and the comic epic left incomplete at his death.

The drama Manfred was written in September of 1816 and published the following year. Byron's play was not meant to be produced on the stage and many consider it to be autobiographical in nature. The central conflict of the plot centers on a person who is wracked with guilt and seeks oblivion due to having committed an unspeakable crime. The exact source of Manfred's guilt is never fully elucidated, but most critics have identified Manfred's crime as being an allusion to Byron's own crime of having an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. This paper attempts to expand on the use of Freud's Psychoanalytic theory for literary criticism by utilizing Moreno's principles of Psychodrama to analyze the drama. In this way, Byron the author becomes the actor/protagonist and the other members of the cast become the "auxiliary egos" 1 who play out the roles of absent people involved in Byron's own problems and fears. It is the purpose of the paper to show how Byron attempts to resolve his own conflicted feelings toward his relationship with his half-sister and his resultant exile from English society through the medium of his cathartic drama.