This chapter explores Byron’s reception through the lens of the Byronic sense of occasion. Focusing on the history of Byron’s contemporary reception, it argues that Byronic reception involves a transformed scene of reading and writing, and a transformed temporality, which is acutely attuned to a sense of occasion, stretching the moment of reception and production across a longue durée. It is a critical commonplace that Byron’s writing is about its own creation and production, but it is also about its reception. The story of Byron’s reception also tells us about the changing practices of Romantic criticism and culture more broadly. The Byron phenomenon taught its contemporaries to think of the poem as a performance, an event, an experience. It is also a kind of entourage. In this transformed scene of reading and writing, the text’s reception – always already anticipated – forms part of the entourage. The chapter examines how Byron’s works contribute to this sustained sense of the text as entourage, event, and public occasion – in furious conversation with its own past, present, and future audiences.

Byron differs from his Romantic contemporaries in his treatment of animals in life and poetry – they are individual beings rather than poetic constructs. If horses are associated with the heroic sublime they are also re-wilded, while dogs are central to his ‘modernisation’ of the artistic attitude to animals in the long nineteenth century.

This chapter has two correlative aims: on the one hand it seeks to complicate the customary conception of Byron as a figure of strength, and on the other hand it challenges the commonplace pejorative understanding of levity as a matter of frivolity, irreverence, or licentiousness, by drawing attention to other, more positive forms of lightness that also play a vital role in Byron’s comic masterpiece. More particularly, by reflecting on Don Juan’s ‘three graces’ (the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, Lady Adeline, and Aurora Raby), the chapter highlights three contrasting models of levity: the carnivalesque, the courtly, and the eschatological. One of the surprising things that emerges from this consideration of the poem’s intermingling of sexual, socio-political, and religious forms of lightness is an underlying posture of epistemological weakness, which both fosters and is fostered by a sceptical openness to possibilities.

Byron's satire of Robert Southey's Vision of Judgment, a Poet Laureate elegy and political settling of scores, upends Southey's Tory preening with liberal political satire, but also supplements this anti-type with unexpected twinning, especially against the unnamed figure of pure principle, the pseudonymous Junius.

This chapter discusses Canto III of Childe Harold and Manfred as marking a turning point in Byron’s writing career. Together, these two works detached Byron from the tragic universe of the Tales and pointed him towards the comic world of Don Juan. Childe Harold III turns from exploring the devastating trauma of painful memory – the Byronic Hero’s, the poet’s and post-Napoleonic Europe’s – to a quest for ways of forgetting pain through the imagination and communing with the natural world. Through these it finds a path into renewed, and new forms of, vitality, though these ultimately prove temporary and the return to the memory of pain inevitable. However, Manfred takes up Childe Harold III’s quest to discover the power of memory itself to console, comfort and revitalise. The result is a new, self-conscious, wilful, and appreciative acquiescence in the flow, and contrary flowings, of his own consciousness – indeed, his existence per se – even as he approaches his death. This prepares the way for Don Juan’s wholesale embrace of the spontaneous vitality, but also impermanence, of all human impulse(s) – an embrace that is fundamental to Byron’s comic vision.

This chapter argues that Byron is famous as a leading figure in Romantic poetry, but his own allegiance was to eighteenth-century culture. I argue that on the one hand he confirms the distinction between the two and yet he also overturns it. This is because he enters so deeply into the contradictions and character of eighteenth-century culture that he is part of their generation of something different. In this he resembles Burke’s deep relation to Whig culture and Newman’s to the Church of England, both of whom by this brought about the transformation of what they revered into something new and yet sourced in the past. I argue that is bound up with a larger historical transition between judging actions as open possibilities and accepting behaviour as an unalterable given. Byron is, as he claimed to be, an ethical poet because his attention is primarily to the former of these.

With his ironic distance and skepticism, Byron often appears to be our contemporary. But is he, or have we remade him in our image? Byron’s life poses this quintessential problem for biography, as the term ‘Byron’ has become the site of artistic and intellectual speculations, and of repeated moral and ethical struggles, as well as continued debate over what really happened. Byron himself believed in the truth of historical record, but he also revelled in the way the imagination shapes reality. His literary personae reify this dual commitment, from Childe Harold to Don Juan. Byron's own story is, like theirs, a tale of self-questioning and of self-forming, mirroring the way in which the art of biography itself has undergone questioning and reinvention. To read and absorb the many biographies of Byron is to trace the development of the contemporary biographical mode, with its meticulous research, its psychological sophistication, and its awareness that imagination as much as fact is required to begin to understand another human being. In this, as it so often seems to turn out, Byron got there before us.

Two main lines of Romantic address descend from the Romantic period, the one – long dominant – identified with Lyrical Ballads, the other with Byron. The conventions of the dominant line are the critical focus of the Byronic line, which was forecast in William Blake and which was adopted and adapted by Pushkin, Lermontov, Heine, Poe, Baudelaire, and Lautréamont.

This chapter identifies habitat as a crucial concept for literary animal studies. Habitat, as a biological concept, is compared with Jakob von Uexküll theory of Umwelt, a given organism’s subjective experience of inhabiting its distinct territory. Both terms are important for animal studies because they enable us to attend to the material and perceptual life worlds of wild creatures, ways of living threatened by habitat loss and climate change. I consider the distinct imaginative work of evoking habitat as a literary setting, discussing four literary works – John Clare’s poetry, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” – that connect human self-awareness with careful attention to the particular ways in which different species of animals dwell in the world.

This chapter accounts for how animals appear in Victorian literature in connection with two overarching themes: shifting definitions of the animal and the human, especially in relationship to racialization and empire, and the incorporation of animals into the political sphere, especially as they proliferate throughout daily life. Both themes offer a productive and foundational lens to analyze the vast representations of animals across Victorian literature, and relate to a variety of other topics such as care and control, domesticity and the family, class and gender, and imperial strategies. Through examining a range of genres, from realist texts and animal autobiography to travel narratives and the literature of empire, this chapter demonstrates how relationships with animals shifted how Victorians saw themselves, their animals, and those across the empire. The chapter argues that texts by authors such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anna Sewell, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schriener, H. Rider Haggard, Mary Kingsley, and Richard Marsh, among others, illuminate the broader implications of extending political care to animals, controlling them across the empire, and using them to account for human difference through demarcating racial categories and structuring the borders of the human.

Popular accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contact with the film industry often spin a tale of professional decline. But rather than ruining his talent, time spent in Hollywood benefited Fitzgerald by providing the financial and creative resources he needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. Furthermore, rather than being revenge tracts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood fiction and his unfinished novel offer some of the early examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. While it is true that Fitzgerald had his share of troubles as a screenwriter, many of these difficulties were of his own devising. Fitzgerald was heavily invested in the notion of the artist as a solitary man of genius. His collaborators often resented his claims to superior taste and judgment, especially since his scripts often weren’t filmic enough. But from the beginning of his career he was a hard-working professional writer who was savvy about making money – especially from the film industry – on the commodities he produced. Hollywood wasn't the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed second act; it was part of the same successful performance.