Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

'The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero in Middlemarch and North and South'

Wootton, S.

'The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero in Middlemarch and North and South' Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

Almost two hundred years after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the Byronic hero remains, as Andrew Elfenbein argues, an ‘unprecedented cultural phenomenon’.1 This essay is not concerned with the more direct descendants of the Byronic hero (Rochester and Heathcliff, for example); rather, I shall be focusing on the less immediately obvious, and in some respects more complex, reincarnations of the Byronic hero in two nineteenth-century novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Establishing previously neglected connections between these authors and the figure of the Byronic hero not only opens new avenues of debate in relation to these novels, but also permits a reassessment of the extent and significance of Byron's influence in the Victorian period. The following questions will be addressed: first, why does a Byronic presence feature so prominently in the work of nineteenth-century women writers; second, what is distinctive about Eliot and Gaskell's respective treatments of this figure; and, third, how is the Byronic hero subsequently reinvented, and to what effect, in modern screen adaptations of their work?

Citation

Wootton, S. (2008). 'The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero in Middlemarch and North and South'. Romanticism, 14(1), 25-35. https://doi.org/10.3366/e1354991x0800007x

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Apr 1, 2008
Deposit Date Feb 14, 2012
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Romanticism
Print ISSN 1354-991X
Electronic ISSN 1750-0192
Publisher Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 14
Issue 1
Pages 25-35
DOI https://doi.org/10.3366/e1354991x0800007x

Files





You might also like



Downloadable Citations