An epic-length poem without a determinate plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as traditional and novel literary forms can coexist with each other, so can existing and emergent concepts of reality, however uneasily. In Don Juan the tension between this new concept of reality and that presupposed by the theory of artistic mimesis manifests itself in Byron’s flouting of the same epic conventions to which he professes his adherence. An epic-length poem without a determinate plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as traditional and novel literary forms can coexist with each other, so can existing and emergent concepts of reality, however uneasily. Considered in the most general terms, this impediment consists in the poem’s self-reflexive non-conformity to generic expectations. In striking contrast to The Prelude, which, for all its appropriations from Paradise Lost, never explicitly refers to itself as an epic poem, Don Juan calls itself an epic or calls attention to its use of epic conventions on more than a dozen occasions, and thus positively invites readers to assess it in these terms. Pope’s use of divine “machinery” and martial rhetoric in The Rape of the Lock is readily understood to be directed not against the classical epic but against the families whose dispute occasioned the poem.
47 Language, Communication and Culture
,4705 Literary Studies
