In this first full-length study of Byron's masterpiece in over thirty
years, Richard Cronin boldly presents Don Juan as the epic poem of its
age. Impressively illuminating the whole literary nineteenth century
through a single work, he asks what kind of epic can be said to
represent an era more readily defined by newspapers and magazines than
by competitors such as Wordsworth's Excursion or Southey's Joan of Arc
arose. Delving into questions of form and choice of hero, he also
explores the controversies that informed the poem's reception, its
contemporary interactions, and its influence on later nineteenth-century
literature. Don Juan, he argues, is the epic poem demanded by an age of
cant and dissembling, when people's feelings and the world they lived in
had become disconnected. In it, he finds a powerful defence of liberal
thinking at a time when that kind of thinking was under threat.