scholarly journals The Uncanny Aura of the Femme Fatale’s Icon in Byron’s DonJuan

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. p25
Author(s):  
Savo Karam
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Moral Dimension ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Critical Attention

The femme fatale trope, the incarnation of the artistic ideal of the writer’s creative imagination, is one of the most captivating female facades to haunt the Western literary tradition. Defined by her liminality, the femme fatale embraces an uncanny appearance that is terrifying but concurrently enthralling. Such oxymoronic combination defines her threatening and sublime representation which echoes Freud’s phenomenon of the uncanny that Lord Byron incarnates through his portrayal of the fatal woman motif. As a dark Romantic poet, Byron perceived beauty in the bizarre, unrestrained attitude of the fatal woman’s figure which shakes the rigid moral dimension of Victorian literature. What is intriguing about Byron’s depiction of his fatal woman is the supernatural, eerie power of her erotic appeal which she adroitly deploys to consume and haunt her victim’s imagination. Many researches tackled Byron’s contribution to the Gothic lore such as the initiation of the male vampire theme; other areas that were of interest to scholars depicted Byron’s homme fatal (the Byron seducer) trope. However, little critical attention pertaining to Byron’s femme fatale motif has been paid, and since his delineation of the femme fatale remains ambivalent and incomplete, this untouched area deserves substantial attention. Although Byron did not initiate the fatal woman figure, it is feasible to study how he conceives this archetype and the extent to which he incorporates Freud’s theory of the uncanny in his Gothic portrayal of two fatal females, Adeline and Catherine, in Don Juan.

The Romantic Grotesque of George Gordon Byron

Tekstualia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (59) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Mirosława Modrzewska
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Poetic Style ◽  
The Grotesque

The article explores the affi nities between Byron’s works with the seventeenth-century literary tradition of carnivalesque discourse. These affi nities can be traced in his comical burlesque writings, such as The Devil’s Drive (1813), Beppo (1818), The Vision of Judgement (1822) and Don Juan (1819–1824). There is a well-established British critical tradition which sees the author of Don Juan as a continuator of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century mock-heroic convention, but his use of the grotesque mode makes him the heir of Miguel de Cervantes or Francisco Quevedo. Byron’s literary identifi cation with the poetic style of the seventeenth-century baroque can be detected in his predilection for a comical deformation of characters, images and meanings. The poet uses the language of monstrosity and transgression to achieve political and religious provocation and to lure his reader into the world of a liberated language, freed from conventional connotations.

Dephallicizing Women in Ryūkyō shinshi: A Critique of Gender Ideology in Japanese Literature

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-586
Author(s):  
Chieko Ariga
Keyword(s):  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
Meiji Period ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
Exclusive Focus

In surveying the history of Japanese literature since the Meiji period (1868–1912), readers immediately recognize that Japanese literature has been approached most predominantly from the perspective of the question of the “modern.” Although specific subjects of focus have varied, the primary underlying question has been whether a literary work is “modern,” “premodern,” or “antimodern.” This approach has been so firmly embedded in the Japanese literary tradition that it has established itself as the most legitimate way to examine literature written after the Meiji period.The issue of the “modern” is related to the question of Japanese modernization; it is unquestionably important and deserves full critical attention in view of the geopolitical position of Japan in Asia, affected by Western hegemonic power over the past few centuries. However, because of this exclusive focus, other significant questions, including questions related to gender, have escaped critical attention.

scholarly journals The East in the Western Perception: Orientalism in some selected Poems of Lord Byron

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-26
Author(s):  
Afaf Ahmed Hasan Al-Saidi
Keyword(s):  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
Negative Impression ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

Orientalism as a literary phenomenon has been recently focused on by different writers all over the world. Many of those who write about Orientalism have not the same understanding, and the divergences are reproduced due to different attitudes toward Orientalism. From various studies concerning Orientalism, there are apparent tributaries confronting the understanding of the concept of Orientalism from different perspectives. Edward Said is one of those who, according to what many Western and Eastern writers say, represent the negative attitude towards Orientalism, and tries only to make it appear ugly and offensive. Many writers, Arabs and non-Arabs, take, more or less, the same approach Said used towards the subject of Orientalism. Others have, to some extent, tried to give excuses for the writers, especially the Romantics, for the negative impression their writings reflected on the readers when going through what is supposed to be Oriental works. Nigel Leask, Sari Makdisi, Emily Haddad, Martin Bright, Tripta Wahi and Naji Oueijan are the significant writers of this group. British orientalists did not use the right approach to look or write about the East. What irritates Said is that these orientalists did not pay attention to find any possibility by which they could bridge the gap between the European and Asiatic parts of the world. This paper tries to trace and to define Lord Byron’s type of Orientalism in some of his oriental works and his chief work Don Juan.

A Pirate or Anything

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talissa J. Ford
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Failure Function ◽  
Spatial Imagination ◽  
The Military

This chapter explores pirates, and pirate colonies, as imagined by Lord Byron and William Hone. The fictional pirates of these texts, like the pirates of A General History, are deeply implicated in the power structures that historical pirates tended to operate outside of: Byron’s and Hone’s pirates are tied to the nation, to the military, to religion, and to a sense of territory more generally. Reading The Corsair and The Bride of Abydos with the perspective of Hone and Don Juan in mind, this chapter argues that depictions of this particular kind of piratical failure function as a diagnosis of the imperial forces that threaten utopian imaginations, while Don Juan proposes a kind of spatial imagination that escapes rather than reinforces imperialism.

Lord Byron: "Don Juan"

1974 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 136
Author(s):  
Charles W. Hagelman ◽  
T. G. Steffan ◽  
E. Steffan ◽  
W. W. Pratt ◽  
Lord Byron
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
Don Juan
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