Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 19
wrote the last major study in 1962. Between the 1960s and 2006, Byron’s creation
seems to have been neglected or forgotten, and is only to be found in very few
studies and articles. When mentioned in articles, critics only concentrate on specific
facets of him, such as his function and appearance in works by George Eliot,
Charles Dickens, Alexander Pushkin or Charlotte and Emily Brontë, but no booklength
studies appeared. 11 In 2006, Lutz’s study The Dangerous Lover was published
in which she revives the important and influential figure of the Byronic hero. Lutz
notes that through the rise of feminism in the late 1960s, the literary persona of
the dangerous lover, thus the Byronic hero, became an outcast within the critical
literary world (12). Furthermore, the Byronic hero has always had a slightly negative
connotation of marginalization, as it is thought that he appears mainly in romance
novels, and that he mainly appeals to women. In any case, the romantic
novel with a Byronic hero, the villain lover, at its centre, has still not been accepted
as a distinct literary genre. Lutz, who argues that the dangerous lover plays
a dominant role in today’s romantic novels and cinema, also criticises this fact.
Even if he appears mainly in female-coded genres, his existence needs to be recognised
(ix). She also criticises the lack of a complete exploration of the dangerous-lover
romance. Its history has not been thoroughly studied despite the fact
that the villain lover, who became the Byronic hero, can be as far traced back as to
the Elizabethan tragedy and is thus not only a figure that plays a part in subordinate
literature but belongs to the literary canon (ix-x).
More importantly, Lutz’s study is primarily a study about longing. It concentrates
on the longing of the hero and scarcely considers the longing of his female
counterpart, which still needs analysing. Lutz states that “Standing always under
the sign of longing is the dangerous lover – the one whose eroticism lies in his
dark past, his restless inquietude , his remorsefull and rebellious exile from comfortable
everyday living.” Furthermore, Lutz notes “When we long we encounter
our own absence” (ix). According to this statement of Romantic ideas, the undefined
longing of the Byronic hero is the reason why he goes out “into the anguished
world in order to find, paradoxically, the self” (x). To find the “self” in an
“other” and thus the wish and hope to be freed of the unbearable longing, to be
redeemed through the love of this other, lies at the origin of the modern romance
novel pattern. To find fulfilment and salvation in love is a privilege that has been
denied to the original Byronic hero.
ony, (London: Oxford University Press, 1933); Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements
of English Romanticism (New York: Gordon Press, 1927); Jacques Barzun, “Byron and the
Byronic”, Atlantic Monthly (August, 1953); Charles Du Bois, Byron and the Need of Fatality, (London:
Putnam, 1932).
11 See: William R. Harvey, “Charles Dickens and the Byronic Hero”, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24.3
(1969): 305-316; Sona Stephen Hoisington, “Eugene Onegin: An Inverted Byronic Poem”,
Comparative Literature, 27. 2 (1975), 136-152; Helen Brown, “The Influence of Byron on Emily
Brontë” The Modern Language Review, 34. 3 (1939), 374-381. Sarah Wootton, “The Changing
Faces of the Byronic Hero in Middlemarch and North and South, Romanticism 14.1 (2008), 25-35.