‘Demolished Worlds’: Manfred and Sublime (Un)burial

This article considers the role of space in structuring both physical and psychological entombment in Manfred. It argues that Byron undoes the Wordsworthian reading of sublime nature in part by utilising gothic notions of repression and burial to describe Manfred’s destruction, and that throughout the text it is the most open and unrestrained spaces of nature – rather than the oppressive physical enclosures typical of the gothic genre –that present the greatest danger of entombment and burial.