Richard Cronin taught for more than forty years at the University of Glasgow. His first monograph was Shelley's Poetic Thoughts (1981), and his most recent are Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824-1840 (2002), Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (2010), Reading Victorian Poetry (2011), and George Meredith: The Life and Writing of an Alteregoist (2019). He co-edited Emma for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (2005), Robert Browning for 21st-Century Oxford Authors (2014), and A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002). This is his ninth monograph.

• Introduction; 1. My poem's epic; 2. I want a hero; 3. Especially upon a printed page; 4. The gate of life and death; 5. Allusions private and inglorious; 6. Taking another tack; 7. Mine irregularity of chime; 8. This is a liberal age.

'The outcome of a lifelong engagement with Byron's poetry, Richard Cronin has written perhaps the best critical appraisal of Don Juan that one could wish for. Among the many impressive aspects of the book is its marshalling of such a wide range of pertinent literary, political, and sociocultural details. Cronin's recall of the poem, the period in which it was formed, and his broader knowledge of nineteenth-century literature, is matched by his refined and exacting close readings.' Philip Shaw, The Charles and Mary Lamb Journal