Unleashed academics, tutors, and ornamental hermits Alice and Rowan do a deep dive into dark hero archetypes on a semi-weekly basis.
On this episode they consider another of Lord Byron’s closet dramas, the controversial Cain (1821).
The pair discuss Byron’s characterisation of the first murderer as a sympathetic figure and consider which archetypes Byron combines to produce his most incendiary protagonist. Along the way they discuss Manichaeism, vegetarianism, Cuvier, and Byron’s continued debt to Milton.
Next time, they discuss Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796)
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Discussed and Recommended Sources
Brewer, William D. "The Diabolical Discourse of Byron and Shelley." Philological Quaterly 70, no. 1 (1991): 47–65.
Burwick, Frederick. "Lord Byron’s Faustian Plays Manfred (1817), Cain (1821), and the Deformed
Transformed (1822)." In Faust Adaptations from Marlowe to Aboudoma and Markland, edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2016.
Byron, Lord. The Major Works. Edited by Jerome McGann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Callaghan, Madeleine. "The Struggle with Language in Byron’s Cain." The Byron Journal 38, no. 2 (2010): 125-34.
Clair, William St. "The Impact of Byron’s Writings: An Evaluative Approach." In Byron: Augustan and Romantic, edited by Andrew Rutherford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Hart, Trevor. "Cain's Byron: A Mystery - on the Inscrutability of Poetic Providence." The Byron Journal 37, no. 1 (2009): 15-20.
Hirst, Wolf Z. "Byron's Lapse into Orthodoxy: An Unorthodox Reading Of "Cain"." Keats-Shelley Journal 29 (1980): 151-72.
MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron Life and Legend. London: John Murray, 2002.
McGann, Jerome. Fiery Dust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Michaels, Leonard. "Byron’s Cain." PMLA 84, no. 1 (1969): 71-8.
Schock, Peter. "The "Satanism" Of Cain in Context: Byron's Lucifer and the War against Blasphemy." Keats-Shelley Journal 44 (1995): 182-215.
Steffan, Truman Guy. Lord Byron’s Cain.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.