George Gordon Byron: A Byronic Hero

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A variant of the Romantic hero, the Byronic hero, appropriately named after its creator, George Gordon Byron, is a character who displays antisocial qualities. A Byronic hero may be described as the following: arrogant, adaptable, cynical, disrespectful, emotionally conflicted, intelligent, mysterious, self-destructive, dominant, and an exile by society. For an example of a Byronic hero, Byron himself describes Conrad, protagonist of The Corsair, as:
He knew himself a villain—but he deem'd
The rest no better than the thing he seem'd;
And scorn'd the best as hypocrites who hid
Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.
He knew himself detested, but he knew
The hearts that loath'd him, crouch'd and dreaded too.
Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt
From all affection and from all contempt:
(Byron I.XI)

Outside of Byron's own works, there exist only a select number of characters in literature that resemble a Byronic hero on the level of Adam, the creation of Victor Frankenstein.
Adam is vividly personified as a Byronic hero. So much, that over the course of ...

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