{"title":"Byron's Poetics of Indigestion","authors":"S. Hall","doi":"10.1353/elh.2023.0002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Lord Byron's Don Juan repeatedly references digestion-and failures of digestion-to register the visceral effects of almost twenty years of near-continuous global warfare on bodies and especially stomachs. If epic is traditionally understood as a poetic form that aggrandizes and gives coherence to the brutality of war, Don Juan reworks epic as a way of rendering the experience of war poetically undigestible. In doing so, the poem develops a non-reparative poetics of indigestion that represents the violence and trauma of war without attempting to celebrate war or make it easily consumable.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"8 1","pages":"55 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ELH","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.0002","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:This article argues that Lord Byron's Don Juan repeatedly references digestion-and failures of digestion-to register the visceral effects of almost twenty years of near-continuous global warfare on bodies and especially stomachs. If epic is traditionally understood as a poetic form that aggrandizes and gives coherence to the brutality of war, Don Juan reworks epic as a way of rendering the experience of war poetically undigestible. In doing so, the poem develops a non-reparative poetics of indigestion that represents the violence and trauma of war without attempting to celebrate war or make it easily consumable.