Abstract

This object of this work is to reveal a heretofore unrecognized quality of discursive production in the Romantic, Modernist, and Contemporary texts that constitute Byron biography and scholarship. Only a very few recent theorists have begun to explore the ways that the Romantic generation of masculine identity manages to write the character of the Byron in a way that also constructs, and is constructed by, narratives of identity that arise at specific historical moments. The dissertation focuses on the dynamics of both identity production in the biographies of Byron, and the production of "Romanticism" itself in the texts that surround and define his life. It depends upon the critical insights of Lacan, Benjamin, Foucault and De Man, among others. From this perspective, I explore the degree to which Byron's supposed narcissism, education, and genius, while always components of Western identity as such, became exaggerated as the truth of identity in the Romantic period, and have encoded our traditional understanding of "Romanticism" as a literary period. Finally, this dissertation, while seemingly "historical" in nature, is a specific critique of the recent New Historical treatments of Byron as an object discoverable by supposed "clear" scholarship---scholarship that does nothing but further the constructed obfuscation of the Byronic image