The Byronic Hero

By description, a Byronic Hero is an idealized, but flawed young man who is often haunted by their past. The Byronic Hero first appears in Byron's semi-autobiography Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, but is later seen in his poems The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara, and his play Manfred. 

Often, these men show the characteristics of:

• arrogance
• high level of intelligence and perception
• adaptability
• suffering from an unnamed crime
• troubled past
• sophisticated, educated
• introspective
• charismatic
• social and sexual dominance
• bipolar tendencies
• being an exile, outcast, or outlaw
• disrespect of rank
• jaded
• cynical
• self-destructive behavior

The Byronic Hero is merely an extension of Byron himself. When he left England in a flurry of scandal, he became obsessed with self-exile, lo and behold, wrote his characters experiencing similar fates. Exile, being haunted by the past, and essentially being a rebel. Childe Harold's exile was self-imposed, whereas Manfred was physically isolated from society. Although called "heroes", the young men portrayed in these poems have dark attributes not normally associated with true heroes.

Peter Thorslev states, "With regard to his intellectual capacity, self-respect, and hypersensitivity,

the Byronic hero is "larger than life," and "with the loss of his titanic passions, his pride, and his

certainty of self-identity, he loses also his status as [a traditional] hero."

With the loss of his "hero" status, Byron's characters become a sort of antihero; they think themselves too flawed and guilty to be a true hero.

"Antiheroes often crop up in deconstructions of traditionally heroic genres. As the struggling, imperfect protagonist begins to gain more respect and sympathy than the impressive-but-impossible-to-relate-to invincible superhero, "anti" heroes have come to be admired as a perfectly valid type of hero in their own right.

It should also be noted that in one definition of the word, the appeal of an antihero is that he or she is often very literally a hero: Namely; he or she does what we wish we could. But whereas Superman, Wonderwoman, Hercules, and many other conventional heroes do it because they lack the physical limitations we do, an antihero does it because he lacks the moral limitations." - TVTropes on "antiheroes".