Don Juan (Byron) | Criticism

Lord Byron
This literature criticism consists of approximately 23 pages of analysis & critique of Don Juan (Byron).
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Don Juan (Byron) | Criticism

Lord Byron
This literature criticism consists of approximately 23 pages of analysis & critique of Don Juan (Byron).
This section contains 6,047 words
(approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by David E. Goldweber

SOURCE: Goldweber, David E. “Byron, Catholicism, and Don Juan XVII.” Renascence 49 (spring 1997): 175-89.

In the following essay, Goldweber analyzes the Biblical overtones in Don Juan.

Many literary critics continue to cast Lord Byron as a deviant and a miscreant who was contemptuous, or at least suspicious, of all that Western culture and Western religion revere.1 Indeed, as a young man who denied nothing but doubted everything, Byron explored superstition, deism, and skepticism on the mental side of things; drinking, gambling, whoring, homosexuality, and incest on the physical side.2 The early cantos of Byron's first masterpiece, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, are pessimistic and nihilistic, depicting the poet's hopeless journey through the ruined and war-torn remnants of once proud European nations. As he journeys, the young poet declares that even when “A thousand years scarce serve to form a state” still “An hour may lay it in the dust” (II.84).3 Surely...

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This section contains 6,047 words
(approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by David E. Goldweber
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Critical Essay by David E. Goldweber from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.