Byron and Romanticism

by Jerome McGann , Edited by James Soderholm

• ISBN13: 9780521007221
• ISBN10: 0521007224
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
General analytical and historical introduction	1	(18)
PART I
Milton and Byron	19	(17)
Byron, mobility, and the poetics of historical ventriloquism	36	(17)
``My brain is feminine'': Byron and the poetry of deception	53	(24)
What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?	77	(16)
Byron and the anonymous lyric	93	(20)
Private poetry, public deception	113	(28)
Hero with a thousand faces: the rhetoric of Byronism	141	(19)
Byron and the lyric of sensibility	160	(13)
Byron and Wordsworth	173	(32)
PART II
A point of reference	205	(18)
History, herstory, theirstory, ourstory	223	(8)
Literature, meaning, and the discontinuity of fact	231	(5)
Rethinking Romanticism	236	(20)
An interview with Jerome McGann	256	(10)
Poetry, 1780--1832	266	(22)
Byron and Romanticism, a dialogue (Jerome McGann and the editor, James Soderholm)	288	(18)
Subject index	306	(3)
Authors index	309