Byron and his Fictions. Peter J. Manning. Detroit:  Wayne State University Press, 1978.  296 pp.

This is a subtle and wide-ranging account of Byron's self-dramatization in his plays and longer poems. The author's thesis is simply and modestly stated in the Introduction:

Surely it is part of the appeal of Byron and of artists like him that the boundaries between unconscious impulse and deliberate choice, between neurotic re-enactment and liberating mastery, remain tantalizingly fluid. Most of Byron's compelling works are fictions of the self, in a manner sometimes more oblique, sometimes more direct.

These “fictions of the self” elaborate a few compelling facts of the poet's personal and family situation. His father, Captain John Byron, married in 1785 to Catherine Gordon, had more or less abandoned his wife by the time Byron was born in 1788. Throughout her life, Mrs. Byron expressed deeply ambivalent attitudes to her absent husband, and the young Byron became a kind of absent-husband surrogate, the recipient both of his mother's impotent rage and unbridled affection. Byron's situation was complicated by his shame over his congenital deformity, a club foot, which represented for him a symbolic wound.

It is Manning's well supported belief that Byron's difficulties with his