ANDREW ELFENBEIN

Byron and the Victorians

This is the first full-length study of Byron's influence on Victorian writers, concentrating on Carlyle, Emily Brontė, Tennyson, Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, and Wilde. Rather than treating influence in terms of source study or of intersubjective struggle, it demonstrates how institutions of cultural production mediate the access that later writers have to earlier ones. These institutions produced a ritual of the Victorian authorial career in which writers repeatedly defined themselves against what they understood Byron to represent. In many cases, they did not reject him outright. Instead, they created fictions of personal development away from values associated with Byron towards those associated with themselves as mature Victorian writers. (from the dust jacket)