Byron and the Baroque

Byron’s mannerist digressive style and his ‘theatricality’ are a method of literary and cultural discourse based on the concepts of irony, paradox and reflectivity that were practised in seventeenth-century literature and culture. This results in the discursive split in the poetic language, which prefers to speak about the heavenly and the divine by reference to deformity and monstrosity. It is marked in a Romantic manner by the presence of the lyrical persona with a deep consciousness of previo