ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that deconstruction offers an important means of re-conceptualizing biographies of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Romantic biography more generally. Deconstruction demonstrates that the dialectical system always excludes something because it cannot understand it in dialectical terms. The author focuses on deconstruction and biography. Romantic biography can only take flight from dialecticism by 'winging itself with laughter'. Deconstruction, then, clearly has radical implications for the kind of binary thinking about the subject and other areas that Romantic biography habitually reproduces. Deconstruction formulates a more radical and unthinkable concept of difference that refuses to be gathered into identity. The author considers what impact deconstruction could possibly have on current biographical accounts of the relationship between Byron and Shelley. Charles E. Robinson sees Julian and Maddalo's conversation as another debate between Shelleyan meliorism and Byronic fatalism and concludes that Shelley was attempting to 'clarify the two poet's different estimates of the human condition'.
