The Archetype “Byronic Hero” in the Literature of the 19th Century

In the second period (after his expulsion from England), J. G. Byron created his most mature and most innovative works, which struck the imagination of his contemporaries and made the poet an iconic thinker for the European youth. The plots of the dramatic poem “Manfred” and the mystery “Cain” were based on the mythological structures of German folklore (the legend of Dr. Faust) and the biblical canon (Book of Genesis). However, in Byron’s imagination, they acquired a philosophical and social content that they had lacked before, exclusively characteristic of Romanticism and the period of disappointment in the Enlightenment ideals. This transformation resulted from the interaction of several contradictory influences in Byron’s poetic laboratory: the rebellious humanistic traditions of the Enlightenment, the declared Classicist doctrine, the apparent influence of the Gothic genre on mass consciousness, and the individualistic tendencies in public life (at least among the British aristocracy), up to a complete severance of old social ties. Unique archetypal models of the Modern times were born from this explosive mixture, including the “Byronic hero” and the “titanic images” of Manfred and Cain, around which a certain mystically tinted poetics of “formula literature,” such as the hermetic chronotope, was formed.