Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's Don Juan: A Marketable Vice (Electronic book text)

In July 1819 London was rocked by the appearance of Don Juan, an 'anonymous poem by Lord Byron, Europe's most famous author. Over the next five years Byron battled with censors and accusations of immorality to get his greatest poem published. The adventures of Don Juan are the basis for this irreverent satire of Regency society and of the male fantasies that structured public culture in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Charles Donelan looks at Byron's masterpiece as a successful combination of serious literary ambition and outrageous pop culture references. Using Byron's Don Juan style as a guide, he offers modern readers an exciting new theory of nineteenth-century poetry as public fantasy. Don Juan is the most controversial long poem in the canon, and this book is the first to understand it from the point of view of pop culture as a male fantasy.