20th March 2024
Online
Kaiwen Hou
The unusual ending of George the Third in The Vision of Judgment has always aroused great attention. Critics argue about Byron’s tolerance of this ‘first opponent’ of liberty. This talk explores Byron’s representation of the unique mechanism of judgement in this poem, to evaluate George’s ‘duties as a king and mortal’. Starting from the readings on tolerance, this talk considers how Byron satirises and critiques the existing judging system’s tyrannical essence and its indifference to the alienation of human nature and suggests that, through George’s unusual ending, Byron avoids and deconstructs the contemporary judging system based on tyrannical binary belief and embraces real human freedom.