Byron and Romanticism

This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by one of the most important critics of Romanticism and Byron studies, Jerome McGann. The collection demonstrates McGann’s evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian. His ‘General Analytic and Historical Introduction’ to the collection presents a meditation on the history of his own research on Byron, in particular how scholarly editing interacted with the theoretical innovations in literary criticism over the last quarter of the twentieth century. McGann’s receptiveness to dialogic forms of criticism is also illustrated in this collection, which contains an interview and concludes with a dialogue between McGann and the editor. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now McGann’s influential work on Byron can be appreciated more widely by new generations of students and scholars.

• Collected essays of the world’s leading Byron scholar available in one volume for the first time • Important insights into Byron’s work, and the ways in which this has been perceived by scholars, critics and theorists over the past thirty years • Introduction and concluding dialogue bringing McGann’s own career and Byron scholarship into new focus

Acknowledgments; General analytical and historical introduction; Part I: 1. Milton and Byron; 2. Byron and Wordsworth; 3. Byron, mobility, and the poetics of historical ventriloquism; 4. ‘My brain is feminine’: Byron and the poetry of deception; 5. What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?; 6. Byron and the anonymous lyric; 7. Byron and ‘the truth in masquerade’; 8. Private poetry, public deception; 9. Hero with a thousand faces: the rhetoric of Byronism; 10. Byron and the lyric of sensibility; Part II: 11. A point of reference; 12. History, herstory, theirstory, ourstory; 13. Literature, meaning, and the discontinuity of fact; 14. Rethinking romanticism; 15. An interview with Jerome McGann; 16. Poetry, 1780–1832; 17. Byron and romanticism, a dialogue (Jerome McGann and the editor, James Soderholm).

‘[Jerome McGann’s] Byron and Romanticism represents a quarter century of important scholarly work on the subtle ironies of Byron’s poetry and of the Byzantine connections between that poetry and Byron’s complicated life. McGann is especially interested in Byron’s complex ‘double-speaking’. Here’s a critic who understands that Byron is always playing games with his audience - actually, with multiple audiences. And that they are extremely tricky, contradictory games … McGann’s larger aim is to reform literary studies, to bring about a new synthesis of traditional, pragmatic criticism and hyper-sophisticated theory. His book is a step in the right direction toward a reform that the serious study of literature urgently needs …’. Ron Smith, Richmond Times-Dispatch

\'This eclectic, thought-provoking volume is an important addition to the Cambridge series of Studies in Romanticism.\' The Byron Journal