Byron and Romanticism

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).

• 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