Byron, Celebrity and Blasphemous Resistance to Authority

Abstract

This thesis argues that the central concern of Byron’s poetry lies in his multifaceted resistance to tyrannical authority—whether political, religious, legal, aristocratic, literary, or cultural. Across his poetic output, Byron consistently challenges the oppressive mechanisms of these systems. Blasphemy functions in Byron’s poems as one rhetorical weapon among others—provocative, destabilising, and directed against prevailing orthodoxies. In the meantime, Byron’s self-fashioning in the context of celebrity culture is inextricable from his antagonism towards the authorities of his time. The poetry becomes a theatre of rebellion, in which Byron enacts political, moral, and aesthetic defiance. Byron’s celebrity thus became a performative strategy that mobilises literary form, persona, and public scandal to expose and unsettle repressive systems of control.
This thesis starts with a sketch of Byron’s developing self-identification within his celebrity, seen throughout his creation of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and his political concerns, as revealed in his three parliamentary speeches. The second chapter works on Byron’s five ‘Oriental Tales’ to emphasise Byron’s juxtaposition between human love and human liberty to reveal the common ground for him to build a connection with his readers and his appeal for blasphemous concerns to his readers. Chapter 3 examines Manfred, The Vision of Judgment and Cain: A Mystery to analyse the expansion of Byron’s celebrity in a broader context of blasphemy and popular radicalism in the long eighteenth century. The thesis ends by examining Byron’s representations of real human life in Don Juan, which concludes with abandoning the binary morality-based social order and a public appeal for real human life of various possibilities and lively subjectivity free from hierarchical systems.