Byron, Pulci, and Ariosto: Technique of Romantic Irony

This paper intends to show the importance of Byron's intertextual relation to Italian Renaissance chivalrous epic in ottava rima. Luigi Pulci's Morgante, Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Byron's Don Juan were chosen to provide textual comparison elucidating problems related to Don Juan's style and genre. The seemingly improvisational element in Don Juan is, in fact, explicable by the influence of Pulcian colloquial style. As far as the genre is concerned, the novelistic nature of Don Juan is primarily the result of Byron's intertextual connection to Italian Renaissance chivalrous epic. A hitherto unnoticed intertextual echo is presented as part of the analyses. Pulci and Ariosto influenced Don Juan with rhetorical devices deeply rooted in the medieval semi-oral tradition. The more general aim of this article is to investigate formal aspects of Romantic irony (on the basis of Friedrich Schlegel's conception) as manifested in Don Juan. The phenomenon of self-reflexivity is focused on and understood both as an aesthetic attitude closely associated with Romantic irony and a general narrative principle seen also in Pulci and Ariosto. The "technique" of Romantic irony encompasses the formal aspects of Don Juan associated with self-reflexivity (laconic narrator's interventions, passages referring to style and genre of the text) as well as the transitional formulas associated with digressiveness and echoing formulaic techniques of interlace. Byron's irony in Don Juan is fertilized by the mock-heroic tone of the Pulcian style.