Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation

Winner of the 2016 Elma Dangerfield Prize "The book is an outstanding contribution to scholarship on Byron's reception and impact, as well as more broadly on the interrelationship between Romanticism and Victorian realism ... . Uncovering yet more ways in which women writers responded to Byron's work and persona, it ultimately asks us to rethink the figure of the Byronic Hero. Wootton's book stands out for the originality of its research, the grace and clarity of the prose, and the persuasive logic of the exposition. It will be useful to the broadest range of Byron scholars, as well as for scholars working in Austen studies, Victorian studies, and studies of film adaptations from literature, among others." (Prize Committee of the International Association of Byron Societies) "A very welcome addition to nineteenth-century scholarship - cogently argued, nicely written, thoroughly researched. I enjoyed reading it immensely." (Ghislaine McDayter, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA)

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon.

Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation charts a new chapter in the changing fortunes of a unique cultural phenomenon. This book examines the afterlives of the Byronic hero through the work of nineteenth-century women writers and screen adaptations of their fiction. It is a timely reassessment of Byron's enduring legacy during the nineteenth century and beyond, focusing on the charged and unstable literary dialogues between Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and a Romantic icon whose presence takes centre stage in recent screen adaptations of their most celebrated novels. The broad interdisciplinary lens employed in this book concentrates on the conflicted rewritings of Byron's poetry, his 'heroic' protagonists, and the cult of Byronism in nineteenth-century novels from Pride and Prejudice to Middlemarch, and extends outwards to the reappearance of Byronic heroes on film and in television series over the last two decades.