The purpose of this thesis is to show the extent to which Byron revealed himself as the hero of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the extent to which that hero was an original creation.

This thesis examines the major works of two outstanding European poets, Lord Byron and Alexander Pushkin, with a view to estimating the extent of their literary and personal affinity. The study begins with a survey of biographical highlights which are relevant to the interpretation of the works of the two poets. Next, the thesis demonstrates that Byron's "Oriental Tales" and Pushkin's "Southern Poems," as well as their major works, play a prominent role in the comparison of their poetic characterizations. In the examination of style, attention is limited to Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, since they are regarded as the masterpieces of their respective authors. An appraisal of the continuing fame of both poets closes the study.

This thesis examines the conscious amalgamation of conflicting forms in Byron’s verse, and how these forms strain to create meaning in the processes of his poetry. Through a series of close readings and critical engagements with other Romantic poets, I endeavour to show how Byron’s poetry is often a rich site of contention between revolutionary and conservative impulses; both in its style and subject matter, and more often than not, in the complicated relationship between them. Beginning with Byron’s problematic place in the English Romantic canon, I attempt to lay a foundation for my claims that for all his mistrust of closed systems and predetermined positions there remained an urging desire to reconcile definitive artistic contour with internal form-developing process in many of his most intense poetic engagements. In his efforts at reconciling an awareness of the ever-moving provisional nature of subjectivity with a deep-rooted demand for evaluative permanence, Byron habitually employs a hybrid poetic idiom which seeks to be both timeless and time specific. In many of his most distinctive compositions, Byron holds a so-called ‘High Romantic’ lyrical mode, in which meaning is immersed in a persistent flowing rhythm, in tension with an eighteenth-century rhetorical style in which the careful placement of weighty words offsets its continuity to striking effect. By bookending my enquiry with Byron’s penetrating discursive conflicts with the naïve lyrical impulses of Wordsworth’s blank verse and what he perceived as the rhetorical appropriations of Keats’s poetry, I wish to demonstrate that Byron’s poetry enacts a curious meeting of nature and culture by a refusal to cleave them.

This thesis will examine how the concepts of gender and nation were inextricably linked for Byron, and how this is demonstrated in his poetry through strategies of gendered embodiment. Byron’s complex relationship with and attitudes towards women displays an ambivalence that characterises his representations of England, due to his perception of the British body politic as a “gynocrasy.” This ambivalence was further exacerbated by Byron’s conception of his own masculinity as one in flux. His literary professionalisation and his status as an outmoded aristocrat contributed to these anxieties regarding his masculine subjectivity. Byron’s poetic fame was particularly influenced by the growing importance of women as readers, writers and arbiters of literary taste in early nineteenth century England. The first chapter will explore Byron’s anxiety about this increased influence of women as competitors and consumers in the literary marketplace, and how this threat manifests in his monstrous configurations of the female body and the body politic in his poetry. Chapter 2 investigates the tensions between Byron’s cosmopolitanism and patriotism in the context of his masculine subjectivity and demonstrates how these tensions shaped Byron’s first commercially successful work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This chapter also examines how Byron uses this masculine subjectivity in his Turkish Tales in order to assert the authority of his opinions on female sexuality and freedom over those expressed in female-authored works with similarly "exotic" themes. Chapter 3 addresses the post-exilic Byron and how his estrangement from England destabilises his conceptions of subjectivity and influences the poetics of the third canto of CHP. This chapter then goes on to track Byron’s recovery from this disintegration and traces how Byron’s poetic voice takes a new direction in his depictions of gender and nation. He begins to depend more heavily on allegory as a strategy of displacement for his feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and in order to place himself in a national literary tradition, as illustrated in his treatments of women and nation in Don Juan. The fourth and final chapter explores Byron’s feelings towards the domestic and commercial worlds both of which he held as bastions of female authority. Byron examines the ramifications of female influence through the heroines who use sexuality as an assertion of this power against a hapless Juan. This chapter will examine his poem The Island and the poems written just before his death in Greece to demonstrate conclusively how Byron’s struggles to recover his masculine subjectivity are persistently staged as contestations of space.

This thesis is significant for the knowledge it offers concerning the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte's personality and career upon the character and the work of Lord Byron. It is significant because of the light it throws on both Napoleon and the culture of Europe during his era. This study is significant in the insight it indirectly gives into the psychological phenomenon of hero-worship, to which it gives a more universal application through the medium of Byron's attitude toward Napoleon.

This is a paper about Canto IV of Lord Byron's long narrative poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It demonstrates the ways in which that poem makes use of both georgic themes and the theories of Catastrophist geology current at the end of the eighteenth century. In short, these two lenses create a mode of poetry in which Byron can view the ruins of Italian culture being consumed by nature in a positive, revolutionary, regenerative light. The paper concludes by contrasting this attitude of Byron's to Victorian attitudes toward ruins in the wake of Uniformitarianism. Readings of the archaeological site at Pompeii, Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," and Darwin's later work demonstrate that late-19th-century scientific georgic cultivates an ethos of preservation and a desire for human agency. / text

The Romantic period coincides with a fundamental shift in Western attitudes toward death and dying. This dissertation examines how Romantic poets engage this shift. It argues that "Romantic mortal consciousness" - a form of mortal reflection characteristic of English Romantic poetry - is fundamentally social and political in its outlook and strikingly similar to what one might now call a liberal social consciousness. During the Romantic period, mortally conscious individuals, less able or willing to depend on old spiritual consolations, began to regard Death not as the Great Leveler of society but rather as a force that sealed social inequality into the records of history. Intimations of mortality forced one to look beyond the self and, to quote Keats, "think of the Earth." This dissertation considersthe development of Romantic mortal consciousness. Death’s transformation from the Great Leveler of social inequality into its crystallizing agent is evident in the Romantic response to Graveyard School poetry. This is the subject of my first chapter, which focuses on Gray’s "Elegy" and Wordsworth’s "The Ruined Cottage." Chapter Two examines Lord Byron’s Cain, where mortal consciousness transforms Cain’s personal lament about mortality into a protest on behalf of a doomed race. Cain anticipates death studies by dramatizing the shift from what Ariès calls the "death of the self" to the "death of the other" and by recognizing that mortality is essentially a cultural construct. However, the other idea of mortality as a solitary reckoning with death does not disappear entirely. Poems by Hemans and Keats, the subjects of my third and fourth chapters, show how the "death of the self" flourishes as the other side of Romantic mortal consciousness. Romantic mortal consciousness has centripetal and centrifugal aspects. It exhorts the ruminative soul to engage sympathetically with the suffering of others. At the same time, it turns the soul inwards, bringing the fate of the self into focus. One aim of this dissertation is to unify these aspects through an analysis of the sublime. In Chapter Five, which focuses on Byron and Smith, I illustrate the connection between mortal consciousnesses, social or political consciousness, and aesthetic awareness.

No description available.

The purpose of this thesis is not to divide and subdivide the various aspects of the personality of Lord Byron, but to record and comment upon what the poet had to say about himself. The work which most easily lends itself to this type of study is the masterpiece Don Juan.

In the laissez-faire system of the late nineteenth century, Sir Edmund Walker, Canadian businessman, saw his life in terms not of his personal gain, but of his service to his country. His Victorian curiosity and ethic of service prompted him to work for Canada in many varied areas from banking, to the arts, to planning a new imperial structure in the Round Table. By World War I, however, this Victorian ethic could no longer survive in the modern world which had evolved. Government also ended laissez-faire by entering fields which business philanthropy had neglected. While most Canadians seemed to recognize Sir Edmund's achievements, after the war they scoffed at his outdated views of service. Byron Edmund Walker, born in 1848 in Haldimand County, Ontario, was the eldest son of a poor, but educated, middle class, English family. Their love of culture and science was transmitted to him at an early age. Although he started banking at twelve, becoming president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce in 1907, Edmund Walker did not neglect this cultural heritage. The Champlain Society, Royal Ontario Museum, University of Toronto, National Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Guild of Civic Art in Toronto are some of the institutions which he worked for, or helped to found. During this same period Sir Edmund also built up the Canadian Bank of Commerce, the nation's second largest bank, and as the foremost banker in Canada, he led discussions at the decennial revision of the Bank Act. A self-made millionaire, Walker died in Toronto in 1924. Because his career coincided with Canada's greatest boom, from about 1900 to 1914, it is difficult to establish how much Sir Edmund's efforts actually contributed to his many accomplishments. This is further complicated by the fact that in these ventures he was assisted ably by Zebulon Lash, his enigmatic, corporation lawyer friend. Yet with qualifications, Walker's 'service' to Canada is still outstanding. This thesis, then, is primarily an examination of Sir Edmund Walker's ideas, and how they functioned in his Canadian environment. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate