Synopses & Reviews
This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by a leading critic of Romanticism in general and Byron in particular. It demonstrates McGann's evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian, and his engagement with the main schools of literary criticism since the advent of structuralism in the 1960s. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now for the first time McGann's important and influential work on Byron can be appreciated by new generations of students and scholars.
Review
"...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...a smart book." Richmond Times-Dispatch"Fascinating and complex." European Romantic Reviews"A smart book...a stride in the right direction toward a reform that the serious study of literature urgently needs..." Richmond Times-Dispatch
About the Author
Jerome J. McGann is the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia, and the Thomas Holloway Professor of Victorian Media and Culture, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Byron, Fiery Dust (1962) and Don Juan In Context (1972) and the editor of The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron (1980-1993).James Soderholm is Fulbright Scholar and Associate Professor of English and American Literature at Charles University in Prague. He is the author of Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend (1996) and Beauty and the Critic: Aesthetics in an Age of Cultural Studies (1997).
Table of Contents
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).