The Cambridge Introduction to Byron

A clear, jargon-free and comprehensible survey of a diverse and voluminous canonical British author.

No Romantic poet has a higher profile than Lord Byron, whose life and writings remain compelling to new audiences. This accessible study - designed for students and the general reader - covers his life, his intellectual and historical context and all areas of his prodigious creativity, in both prose and verse.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 politicians - but 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.