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Byronic
Belonging to or derived from Lord Byron ( 1788 - 1824 ) or his works. The Byronic hero is a character-type found in his celebrated narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage ( 1812 - 18 ), his verse drama Manfred (1817), and other works; he is a boldly defiant but bitterly self-tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social norms but suffering for some unnamed sin. Emily Brontë's Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) is a later example.
Byronic Hero
A term for the dark, brooding, rebellious and defiant hero associated both with the character of George Gordon, Lord Byron and the heroes of many of his poems and plays. In the 19th century the Byronic hero became a major feature of ROMANTICISM, its internally conflicted, alienated, and demonic strain at once attractive and dangerous. The Byronic hero owed something to the villain of the GOTHIC NOVEL and the suggestion of diabolism related to the FAUSTIAN THEME. His literary descendants include Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the figure of Jeffrey Aspern in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888).
 
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