Byron's 'Don Juan' and Nationalism

The dissertation explores the discrepancy between critical reception towards Byron as a Romantic poet in contemporary Romantic scholarship and in Chinese historical evaluation (with certain reference to the European Continent). Byronic contradictions pose a problem to Romantic scholars who are engaged to interpret the interplay between Byron the man and Byron the poet. They share the view that Byron succeeds in manipulating his own personal image to promote his poetical visibility and tend to doubt if his poems could stand alone without the reference to his letters and journals. In China, as in many other countries of European Continent and Asia, Byron is often viewed in a more positive way as the very name has become a byword for liberal nationalism and the rebellion against tyranny.;I propose to comprehend the perceptive gap by focusing on Don Juan which best contextualizes Byron in the flow of historicity with the dimension of nationalism. I intend to delve into three structural units of Don Juan---digression, narrative, a lyric song---to argue that Byronic contradictions manifest nationalism in its multiple contingencies.;Firstly in digression Byron presents a national reality which gradually displaces his cherished cosmopolitan ideals. Among many other pressing problems of his day, political renegades, the paradox of scientific innovations, the rise of intellectual ladies and the commoditization of marriage and family constitute the tangible part of Byron's domestic recalling. With retrospective commentaries Byron fulfills the act of imagining native land; and in this regard nationalism is the spiritual support of the expatriate existence.;Secondly by reading Don Juan as the quest romance of the individual initiation, I bring the narrative into scrutiny and argue that the hero's transformation involves an implicit evolution of the national identification. In terms of subjective consciousness, nationalism embodies the mature vision of masculine selfhood. Don Juan's encounter with both female and male characters, through his repeated border-crossing, illuminates a metaphorical process from rejection to embrace of native roots, from negation to affirmation of national bonds Juan's rite of passage---sexual initiation, surviving shipwreck, the trial of the exotic love and battlefield and diplomacy---transmits a national subjectivity which corresponds to the Byronic existence of mobility.;Thirdly 'Isles of Greece' adds an alternative yet prospective dimension to perceive the tension between national anxiety and modernity. In English context its meanings vary as the contextual focus shifts from poetical to socio-biographical and to existential level. The theme of the national independence is complicated by its negative elements such as the identity of the songster. In the Chinese context, 'the Isles of Greece' initiates and embodies a myth-making process as it gives vent to the anxiety of modernity faced by Chinese people in the opening of the twentieth century. The individual shaping of the 'Isles' by three Chinese intellectual pioneers symbolizes the simultaneous awakening of Chinese national consciousness and individual consciousness. The extended reading of Byron by Lu Xun, together with his reworking, voices the existential dilemma of modern enlighteners. His invocation of 'Mara poets' is prophetic of the modern intellectuals who possess both vision and willpower to eradicate ignorance and public apathy.;In conclusion Don Juan reveals that Byron's participation in the modern historicity of nationalism involves three dimensions---residual cosmopolitan ideals, English national consciousness and the independence of the oppressed nations. Don Juan embodies a historical magnetic field where Byron's existence actualizes the potential conflict of the modernity.