In his work Byron’s portrayal of the hero as an eternally homeless wanderer, partly doomed by his own wild nature, is by no means original. But earlier heroes of this type invariably felt guilty or melancholic about the fact that they were outside society, whereas in Byron the outsider status becomes transformed into ‘a self-righteous mutiny’ against society, ‘the feeling of isolation develops into a resentful cult of solitude’, and his heroes are little more than exhibitionists, ‘who openly display their wounds’.63 These outlaws, who declare war on society, dominate literature in the
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