Don Juan Bibliography

Barton, Anne. Byron, Don Juan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. [A short but excellent introductory treatment of the poem that contains substantial information, especially on the poem's autobiographical connections. Chapters on (1) The Making of Don Juan, (2) Style and Form, (3) The poem (essentially a chronological reading), and (4) The after-life of Don Juan.]

Bloom, Harold, ed. Lord Byron's Don Juan. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. [Although Bloom's introduction is not his best work, the collection includes excellent essays (all previously published) by George Ridenour, Jerome McGann, Peter Manning, Michael Cooke, Candace Tate, and Andrew Cooper.]

Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Don Juan, vol 3 of The Complete Poetic Works. Ed. Jerome J, McGann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. [McGann's monumental edition is absolutely indispensable. His commentary on Don Juan is especially illuminating in tracing the history and context of composition and the ways in which the poem incorporates elements of Byron's experience. McGann also edited a useful selection of Byron for "The Oxford Authors" (1986), including the complete Don Juan as well as other major works.]

Donelan, Charles. Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's Don Juan: A Marketable Vice. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 2000. [Sees Byron's poem as a reaction against the bourgeois interest in the suppression of vice-literary and sexual. The chapters walk chronologically through the poem, emphasizing the themes of commodification, changing social relations, conventions of gender (especially "the problematics of gender"), the ambiguities of literary conventions, ideas of the hero, the uncertainties of literary genres, and the development of modernity.]

Easterlin, Nancy Lincoln. "Ridiculing Sublimity: Narrative Irony and the Critique of Maturity in Byron's Don Juan." English Language Notes 30.2 (December 1992): 34-49. ["Byron creates a narrator who is consistent only in his unpredictability and associative digressiveness; compulsively subverting his own statements, he continually calls into question the notion of predictable behavior based on an identifiable core of values that constitute a unified self."]

Elledge, Paul. "'Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Byron's Julia and the Instabilities of Valediction. South Atlantic Review 56.2 (May 1991): 43-57. [Essentially provides a detailed psychograph of Julia's letter. The duplicitous nature of the letter (the discourse of love) echoes the unstable and paradoxical nature of love itself.]

England, A. B. Byron's Don Juan and Eighteenth-Century Literature: A Study of Some Rhetorical Continuities and Discontinuities. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975. ["My concern in this study is with the manner in which certain rhetorical tendencies that may be regarded as characteristic of eighteenth-century literature are echoed and continued, and also significantly departed from, in the poems themselves." The chapters focus on Byron's relation to (1) Pope and moral satire; (2) Swift, Butler, and Burlesque; and (3) Tom Jones and comic narrative.

--. "The Style of Don Juan and Augustan Poetry." In Byron: A Symposium. Ed. John D. Jump. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975. 94-112. [Compares Don Juan to Pope and Swift. When Byron seems close to Pope, his language reflects an ordering mind, in contrast to the disorder of the satiric targets. But this rhetorical order occurs rarely in the poem. Byron seems actually closer to Swift. A burlesque style tends to undermine the concept of hierarchical structure.]

Furst, Lilian R. Fictions of Romantic Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. [Argues that the central character of Don Juan is not the hero but the narrator, and that the poem is only partially satiric. Its pervasive mode is irony-but a strangely subversive irony in which we cannot pin down the narrator's position, with its essential tension between spontaneity and self-consciousness. "The rapid multiplication of perspectives produces on the one hand an exhilarating awareness of freedom, but on the other an ominous sense of disorientation."]

Garber, Frederick. Self, Text, and Romantic Irony: The Example of Byron. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. [Chapter 9 reads Don Juan as an attack on cant: Satire is the complement to cant, standing against it in symmetrical opposition. Rhetorical irony is the parody of cant, mimicking the order of its duplicitous cousin." Chapter 10 includes a comparison of Don Juan to Candide but concentrates on romantic irony as a mode of satiric attack: "plays with duplicities by going double with values, holding up to our eyes those it wishes to destroy but keeping within our vision, though at a distance, those for whose sake the destruction is accomplished." The resulting view of Don Juan is rather surprisingly positive.

Goode, Clement Tyson, Jr. George Gordon, Lord Byron: A Comprehensive Annotated Research Bibliography of Secondary Materials in English 1973-1994. Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow, 1997. [Presents works on Byron by year, annotating articles and listing reviews for books. The limitations of this generally useful bibliography are that it is over-inclusive-virtually everything that mentions Byron is included-and that the summaries are sometimes not substantial enough to enable clear distinctions between what is important and what is not.]

Haslett, Moyra. Byron's Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. [Looks carefully and imaginatively at Don Juan in the context of both canonic works on Juan (such as Molière and Mozart) and popular theatrical performances; balances historical and reception studies against myth criticism. Speculates on how the meaning of Don Juan was constructed by women and working-class readers and on the poem's complex treatment of seduction.]

Hazlitt, William. "Lord Byron." In The Spirit of the Age. In The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P. P. Howe. London: J. M. Dent, 1932. 11: 69-78. [An thoughtful and important, if largely hostile, early reaction to Byron in general and Don Juan in particular: "He hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in defacing the images of beauty his hands have wrought; and raises our hopes and our belief in goodness to Heaven only to dash them to earth again, and break them in pieces the more effectively from the very height they have fallen. Our enthusiasm for genius or virtue is thus turned into a jest by the very person who has kindled it, and who thus fatally quenches the sparks of both." But Byron's real epitaph is that he "died a martyr to his zeal in the cause of freedom, for the last, best hopes of man."]

Kelsall, Malcolm. Byron's Politics. Sussex: Harvester; New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1987. Kelsall takes an interesting but rather conservative and (to my mind) somewhat distorted view of the politics of Don Juan. He sees Byron as an aristocratic liberal who hates all politics and is caught by the paradoxes of his position. His "heroic outbursts" and "cynical self-subversion . . . both come from being of 'no party'--using 'party' in its widest sense--and of belonging to a patrician caste which, traditionally antagonistic to the Crown, has lost its historical function of speaking on behalf of the people"]

MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. [MacCarthy's biography, commissioned and published in London by John Murray, the publishers of Byron for most (but, significantly, not all) of his life, draws on records preserved in the publishing house and appears at a time when biographers can be more frank about the bisexuality of their subjects. (MacCarthy sees women as a frequent but secondary passion for Byron.) The result is a good, full biography that is rather short on criticism of the works themselves.]

Manning, Peter J. Byron and his Fictions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978. [Chapter 6. on "The Byronic Hero as Little Boy," concentrates on education and on maternal and paternal figures and argues that Cantos I-IV represent a fictional rearrangement of Byron's own life. "The cantos cannot be taken as literal autobiography, but their very departures from strict accuracy enlarge their interest from another perspective. They offer a revealing picture not of Byron's outer, but of his inner, life: his sense of himself and of his past in 1818-1819."]

--. "Don Juan and the Revisionary Self. In Romantic Revisions. Ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 210-26. [Byron, like Scott, sought to manipulate the disparities between written literature and the oral tradition in order to arrive at the open structure more appropriate to conversation. "The loose construction of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, their episodic structure and additive, aggregative character, their repetitiousness and copiousness, are the natural means of imagining extended narrative in an oral context," but the early nineteenth century, with its mass production of literature, was not such a context.]

Marchand, Leslie A. Byron: A Biography. 3 vols. New York: Knopf, 1957. [For many years the standard bibliography, but, at the time, necessarily reticent about Byron's homosexuality and other aspects of his sometimes illicit life. Nonetheless, it is detailed and thorough and still very much worth consulting.]

--. "Narrator and Narration in Don Juan." Keats-Shelley Journal 25 (1976): 26-42. ["Byron continues to have--or to affect--a carelessness with respect to the fictional basis of his story. He seems to consider the narrative as a mere peg on which to hang his philosophical, worldly, or nonsensical reflections." These reflections, and the personality of the author, constitute the main interest of the poem.]

Martin, Philip W. Byron: A Poet Before his Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. [Chapter 8, on Don Juan, argues that the poem is easy to read but hard to explain. Byron's encounter with the Italian octava rima and with the funny rhymes of Pulci provided him a carnivalesque liberation. Don Juan assaulted its middle-class audience through its disconcerting classical references and illusions; its combination of aristocratic manner with coarse material; its "after-dinner hauteur"; its spontaneous and unconsidered statements. Its greatest success lies in the narrative of Cantos I-VIII, especially the shipwreck and Ismail sections, but there is a falling-off in the English cantos.]

McGann, Jerome J. Don Juan in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. [A particularly important book on Don Juan by a major scholar-especially good on the contexts of the poem's composition. "Byron began Don Juan as a literary and political manifesto to his age," but as the poem progressed and Byron's concerns and experience changed, the poem changed as well: "The nature of the poem was literally being discovered as it was written."  In style too the poem is always in transition. What Byron sees is "a vast spectacle of incongruences held together in strange networks between the poles of sublimity and pointlessness." The narrative is equally unpredictable: "the true significance of sequential events is not that they confirm a wonderful, harmonious order in the world but that they reveal the equally wonderful, apparently endless, and yet finite possibilities of order and disorder"]

Ruddick, W. "Don Juan in Search of Freedom: Byron's Emergence as a Satirist." In Byron: A Symposium. Ed. John D. Jump. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975. [Traces the development of B as a satirist from English Bards to the English Cantos. "It was only when he learned to rethink the meaning of Pope and Augustan satire that he was able, in his late satires, to display the full richness of life, personal relations, and the satiric experience."]

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