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Introduction Introduction
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Byron’s Use of the Classics Byron’s Use of the Classics
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Byron, Decline, and the General Sign of the Classical Byron, Decline, and the General Sign of the Classical
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Suggested Reading Suggested Reading
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20 The Classical Inheritance Byron and the ‘Literary Lower Empire’
Get accessJonathan Sachs is Professor of English at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism (2018), Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–1832 (2010), and, with the Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (2018). Together with Andrew Stauffer, he has recently edited Lord Byron: Selected Writings (2024) for the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series. Sachs has held a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and two fellowships at the National Humanities Center (US).
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Published:22 October 2024
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Abstract
This chapter considers the ways in which Byron’s sense of Roman literary history informs his ideas about the status and future of British poetry, in his letters, published prose, and in Don Juan’s English Cantos. But the chapter also insists that Byron’s obsession with Classical antiquity and literary decline was part of a more widespread cultural trend. Through comparisons with Thomas Love Peacock, Anna Barbauld, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chapter engages with three related points that extend the implications of Byron’s use of ancient examples. Firstly, comparisons to antiquity are particularly useful for those thinking about the future because the Classical past represents a completed time horizon. Secondly, the future perfect mode is a way of formulating how the present will be received in the future as history. Finally, while antiquity helps to shed light on the present, the present somehow unfolds at a faster pace than the Classical past.
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