Critical Essay | Critical Essay by D. L. Macdonald

Critical Essay by D. L. Macdonald

SOURCE: Macdonald, D. L. “Incest, Narcissism and Demonality in Byron's Manfred.” Mosaic 25, no. 2 (spring 1992): 25-38.

In the following essay, Macdonald situates Manfred within the Faustian tradition to account for the spirit world Byron created.

In 1816, Byron left England forever, his reputation ruined by the collapse of his marriage and the rumors of his affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He went first to Switzerland, where he met the Shelleys and suggested that they all pass the time by writing ghost stories. The most famous fruit of this suggestion was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Byron himself began a story but soon gave it up; it was completed by his personal physician, J. W. Polidori, and eventually published, under Byron's name, as The Vampyre (1819). Byron did not, however, entirely abandon the ghost-story project: later in the summer, after a visit by the Gothic novelist M. G. Lewis,...
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