Sataniczność kreacji bohatera w Arabie Juliusza Słowackiego

This article attempts to read Juliusz Słowacki’s Arab from the comparative perspective of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The protagonist of Słowacki’s oriental tale, who is a variation on the Byronic hero, also shows similarities with Milton’s Satan: unceasing motion, obsession of revenge, loneliness, axiological preference of evil. The analysis of those similarities creates a new interpretative context for Arab, which was hitherto regarded as a superficial study of the pathological psyche or a caricature of the Byronic model.

Hero or Dandy? Gender Identity, Politics, and Dialogism in Byron’s Sardanapalus

Starting with an analysis of the mirror scene in Sardanapalus as a symbolically dense representation of a series of crucial issues in Byron’s works, this article examines the ways in which the play was used by the author to challenge and interrogate two of his stereotypical, widely accepted public images, ‘Byron as a Byronic hero’ and ‘Byron as an effeminate dandy’, by proposing an alternative figure that combines traits from both stereotypes. Issues of effeminacy, masculinity, and homosexuality will be discussed in relation to dialogism and politics, linking Byron’s multifaceted drama to wider aesthetic, performative and political concerns.

Antithetical Minds: Eliot’s Byron and Byron’s Burns

This article examines the influence which Robert Burns had on Lord Byron’s poetry and his creation of the Byronic Hero, while also viewing T.S. Eliot’s 1937 essay on Byron as a significant piece of Byron criticism - useful not just for its insights on Byron, but for the affinities it reveals between Byron and Burns, and in turn, what it reveals about some of Eliot’s own critical and poetic practices. Eliot ranked Byron as second only to Chaucer in terms of ‘readability’, and praised him for his gifts as a tale-teller and his art of digression. I argue that Burns’s poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’ was an important source for the techniques of digression and self-conscious performance found in Don Juan, as well as for Byron’s conception of the Byronic Hero, where, again, ‘Tam O’Shanter’, and The Jolly Beggars, are particularly illuminating.

The Iconization and Mythologization of Byron’s Life and Work in Nineteenth-Century Netherlands and Europe

Lord Byron is one of the most striking nineteenth-century examples of an icon in the modern sense of the word. Far into the nineteenth century Byron and the main characters from his poems remained models for the rebellious ‘romantic’ hero: a modern version of Milton’s fallen angel. Much has been written about Byron’s work, life and reputation. This enduring interest makes ‘Byron’ ideally suited for a demonstration of research into the historical development of an iconic person as a cultural model. The chapter analyses the Dutch reception of Byron and shows its entanglement with the discussion about the ‘un-Dutch’ character of Romanticism. Paradoxically, there was also an appropriation of Byron, resulting in a Christian ‘light’ version of the ‘Byronic hero’.

Bellini’s Il pirata as Virtual Tourism in Late Georgian London

This article considers the 1830 London premiere of Bellini’s Il pirata as virtual tourism. Musicologists, singers, and critics have long acknowledged opera’s power to transport listeners into other worlds, but there has been no sustained critique of opera as a mediation of tourist experience. Here I confront opera’s impulse to virtual tourism through a reading of Bellini’s Il pirata, its opening shipwreck, and its Byronic source history. I also examine the opera’s staging within the context of other technology-driven entertainments of the early nineteenth century, such as panoramas and aquadramas. Like other contemporary spectacles, operas were judged by how well they transported audiences elsewhere. William Grieve’s extravagant stage designs dazzled audiences, especially the opening shipwreck of Gualtiero, the opera’s Byronic hero. This simulated shipwreck connected several British obsessions, including the ocean as a symbol of the sublime, the rise of the shipwreck as a site for disaster tourism, and the hero’s status as a suffering traveler—all areas of Romantic culture that entangled intensity and immersion, literal and aesthetic transports, and tourist and theatrical modes of consciousness. British critics treated Bellini’s Il pirata not as literature, but as a mediation of tourist experience, and in so doing, they activated a range of contemporary anxieties about the traveler’s aesthetic authority against the rising tides of mass tourism and popular taste.

Edgar G. Ulmer — Roger Corman — Stuart Gordon. Filmowe adaptacje opowiadania Edgara Allana Poego Czarny kot

The article entitled Edgar G. Ulmer — Roger Corman — Stuart Gordon. Movie adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” is a comparative analysis of three adaptations of a gothic short story. The attempt at finding inspirations from romantic poetics in the works of film directors, created in different decades and answering the question of how is it possible to transfer assumptions of romantic literature into movie language, was made in this text. In the movie from 1934, Edgar G. Ulmer connects gothic poetics with modernism aesthetics. He also adds historical context, referring to events in the First World War. On the other hand, taking classic literature became an opportunity for Roger Corman to play with convention. He expresses it in the adaption from 1962, in which terror gives space to humour. Stuart Gordon in turn, creates a post-modern variation based on a theme of The Black Cat, making Poe himself the main character of the movie from 2005. The important criterion of interpretation includes the motives of the Byronic hero, cat, madness and crime. Analysis of different ways to re-interpret the gothic short story leads to conclusions about filmmakers’ attitude to literary prototype. Also, the cultural context of individual adaptations was pointed out.