A result of this book is: If we accept the Baroque, and seventeenth-century literature and culture, as sources of Byron’s literary dialogue with cultural tradition, we may cease to perceive the writer as an author suspended between two mutually exclusive interpretational systems, either as the liberal satirist or as the grandiose gothic seducer.

Miros?awa Modrzewska is a lecturer in the University of Gda?sk Institute of English. She has published extensively on Romantic writers (Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Juliusz S?owacki) and is currently working on Burns’ reception in Poland. She is the author of the Polish section of a volume on European Romanticism.

Contents: George Gordon Byron and the Baroque – The Romantic canon – Seventeenth-century literature and Romanticism – Mannerism and neo-baroque in nineteenth-century literature – Discursive use of poetic language – The Romantic grotesque – Theatricality and dissociational literary discourse.