'Don Juan' and the advertising and advertised Lord Byron

An historical coincidence largely ignored in Byron studies, the life and career of George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) were roughly coeval with the birth of “modern” advertising in the late eighteenth century, a phenomenon associated with the ongoing “consumer revolution” and the expansion of the periodical press. À la “The New Economic Criticism”, this study explores some ramifications of that coincidence, focusing primarily on Don Juan. I argue that Don Juan—as a poetic text, literary commodity, and cultural “event”—responds ambivalently to, and is significantly inflected by, the rise of advertising and marketing.; Chapters Two and Three lay the historical and biographical groundwork for the study by surveying the rise of advertising and its state during Byron's lifetime and by mapping out Byron's attitude toward and involvement with advertising. In Chapter Four, I begin to explore Byron's literary engagement with advertising in Don Juan, arguing that Byron's opening line of canto I—“I WANT a hero”—parodies the newspaper “want ad” and military recruitment advertising. In Chapter Five, I argue that the conclusion of canto I, stanzas 200ff. (i.e., “My poem's Epic…”), is a sustained exercise in self-conscious advertising satire that reveals Byron's misgivings about “selling” himself in the literary marketplace. In Chapter Six, I address Byron's references to advertisements for consumer goods like Macassar's Oil, “Patent Blacking”, etc., and argue that Byron communicates his hostility to, and misgivings about his compromises with, commercial culture by simultaneously satirizing and engaging in advertising and puffery. In Chapter Seven, I explore the sensational marketing of the first installment of Don Juan, treating its publication as a proto-“pseudo-event” and arguing that Byron's engagement with advertising in Don Juan should be nuanced by the aggressive marketing of the poem. Finally, in Chapter Eight, I argue that several episodes in subsequent installments of Don Juan—namely, the slave market, Gulbeyaz, and harem episodes—loosely allegorize Byron's experiences in the literary marketplace where Byron sold himself and was sold as a literary commodity.