Lord Byron (1788-1824), »history’s first pop star«, polarised more than anyone else during his lifetime and even demystified the myth of the gloomy hero, libertine, bourgeois terror and freedom fighter himself. In a diverse collection of essays, Richard Schuberth reconstructs the transitional period to the morally strict Victorian era and rehabilitates »Byron, the first anti-Byronist« as a relaxed critic of identity, the cult of stardom and his own narcissism. Schuberth also consults the Byronian anti-hero on Orientalism, looted art and post-colonialism, the invention of the modern self, »Byromania« and early pop culture, feminism, anti-Semitism, his physical disability, his bisexuality, dandyism, his place in the political movements of his time and his status as a poet in the dichotomy between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
The volume is completend thorugh essays on the »Byronists« Mikhail Lermontov, Emily Brontë and Petar Petrovic Njegoš.
Richard Schuberth, born in 1968 in Ybbs an der Donau, studied Cultural Anthropology, Philosophy, Psychology and History in Vienna. He has written novels, comedies, essays, aphorisms, poetry, songs, screenplays and non-fiction.
