Byron's Ghosts

Byron is rarely thought of as a spiritual writer. However, as this bold new collection shows, this is the result of an impoverished notion of the spiritual and a reflection of biased priorities in Romantic studies. Reflecting on the poets claim that immaterialisms a serious matter, this interdisciplinary collection of essays, from British and American scholars, calls into question the prevailing materialist consensus, and offers a fresh and theoretically inflected reading of Byrons poetry. Byrons Ghosts is the first book-length examination of spectrality in Byrons work. It is on the one hand concerned with what Mary Shelley in her essay On Ghosts refers to as the true old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost, though it is also a postmodern response to the spectral turn in critical theory, which brings into view a range of phantom effects and non-Gothic spectres. Focusing attention on these diverse modalities of the ghostly, the specially assembled essays complicate the popular image of Byron as a sceptical or anti-Romantic poet and reveal a great deal about his work that could not be uncovered in any other way.