Abstracts
Abstract
Catherine II of Russia, a glamorous, enlightened Romanticist figure in her own right, enraged both Coleridge and Byron. Coleridge, who reported her bloody campaigns in The Watchman, cursed her cruelty at the battle of Ismail in “Ode on the Departing Year” just as she was dying. Twenty-seven years after her death, Byron, in Don Juan cantos 6 to 10, which cover the Russian wars and the St. Petersburg court, attacked her even more vituperatively. Thus, Coleridge’s decision not to be a “Historiographer of Hell” is taken up by Byron in his decision to be that historiographer. The two poets’ responses to Catherine’s brutality and sexuality are intertwined. At the basis of their anger is Catherine’s use of human persons as things. Both show their disgust by reducing the Tzarina to her sexual body, vindictively turning her into a “thing” through rhetorical plays on her body parts.
Appendices
Bibliography
- Alexander, John T. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. N.Y. and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
- Avkhimovich, Irina. “Lord Byron’s Critique of Despotism and Militarism in the Russian Cantos of Don Juan.” Master’s Thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008.
- Byron, George Gordon, Lord. “Some Observations Upon An Article in Blackwoods Magazine.” In The Works of Lord Byron in Verse and Prose. Ed. Fitz Green Halleck. 2 vols. Hartford: H. Andrus & Son, 1853. 1: 303-11.
- Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Don Juan. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958. (DJ).
- Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 12 vols. London: John Murray, 1973-94. (LJ).
- Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. .
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (BL).
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Essays on His Own Times. Ed. David V. Erdman. 3 vols. London and Princeton: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1978. (EOT).
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. TheFriend. Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. Princeton: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1969.
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lay Sermons. Ed. R. J. White. London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1972. (LS).
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Ode on the Departing Year,” Poetical Works. Ed. J. C. C. Mays. 3 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 1: 306. (PW).
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Shorter Works and Fragments. Ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. (SWF).
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Watchman. Ed. Lewis Patton. London and Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1970.
- Elfenbein, Andrew. “Byron, Gender, and Sexuality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Byron. Ed. Drummond Bone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 66-8.
- Farmer, J. S. and W. E. Henley. Slang and its Analogues. New York: Arno Press, 1970.
- Franklin, Caroline. Byron’s Heroines. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
- Garrett, Martin. The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Byron. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- Jackson, Emily A. Bernhard. “‘Least like Saints’: The Vexed Issue of Byron’s Sexuality.” The Byron Journal 38 (2010): 29-37.
- Kernberger, Katherine. “Power and Sex: The Implication of Role Reversal in Catherine’s Russia.” The Byron Journal 8 (1980): 42-9.
- Lang, Cecil Y. “Narcissus Jilted: Byron, Don Juan, and the Biographical Imperative.” In Jerome McGann, ed. Historical Studies and Literary Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. 143-79.
- Manning, Peter. “The Byronic Hero as Little Boy.” In Harold Bloom, ed. Lord Byron’s Don Juan. N.Y.: Chelsea House Publications, 1987. 43-65.
- Massie, Robert K. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. N.Y.: Random House, 2011.
- Ridenour, George. “A Waste and Icy Clime.” In Edward E. Bostetter, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Don Juan. New York: Prentice Hall, 1969. 39-45.
- Taylor, Anya. “Coleridge’s ‘Fire, Famine, Slaughter’: The Vendee, Rage, and Hypostasized Allegory.” European Romantic Review 21.6 (2010): 711-26.
- Taylor, Anya. Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
- Wolfson, Susan. “‘Their She-Condition’: Cross-Dressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan.” ELH 54.3 (Autumn, 1987): 585-617.
- Woodring, Carl. Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960.