This book offers a reappraisal of Byron's tenure of landed estates, an entirely new explanation of events surrounding the sale of his ancestral home at Newstead Abbey, and new thoughts on his financial circumstances during his years in Italy and Greece. Byron is examined as a landed aristocrat, and his financial and business affairs are unravelled in this context."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume is the first to draw together, in eight original essays by international scholars, some of the dominant strains in critical thinking about Byron’s temperament and behaviour. Using discourses and paradigms drawn from a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, history of medicine, behaviourism and cultural studies, its contributors explore and synthesise the development of “behavioural strategies” and their impact on his poetic manner. Studies of the precise relationship of the poet’s body and mind have often placed Byron within some of our modern psychological and medical frameworks without acknowledging that these “diagnoses” are bound up with the complex business of reading and responding to literature. The topic of ‘temperament’ uniquely allows concurrent discussion of body and mind within the context of Byron’s writing, as well as his life. In this sense, the book is primarily literary. Recent scientific or quasi-scientific theory is utilised and not discounted, but the book insists upon the relevance of literary procedures and evidence, broadly understood, which are not dependent upon it and can contribute to, enlarge, or cast doubts upon some of its claims.

In this first full-length study of Byron's masterpiece in over thirty years, Richard Cronin boldly presents Don Juan as the epic poem of its age. Impressively illuminating the whole literary nineteenth century through a single work, he asks what kind of epic can be said to represent an era more readily defined by newspapers and magazines than by competitors such as Wordsworth's Excursion or Southey's Joan of Arc arose. Delving into questions of form and choice of hero, he also explores the controversies that informed the poem's reception, its contemporary interactions, and its influence on later nineteenth-century literature. Don Juan, he argues, is the epic poem demanded by an age of cant and dissembling, when people's feelings and the world they lived in had become disconnected. In it, he finds a powerful defence of liberal thinking at a time when that kind of thinking was under threat.

This fresh perspective on Byron's relationship with Greece throws new light on its importance both for Byron and for Greece.

Byron’s Religions is the most comprehensive study yet of the poet’s deep, diverse and eclectic attitude to religion. The articles, by several well-known and distinguished scholars, cover many of his poems and plays, taking in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Blasphemy, Calvinism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. The tentative conclusion is that Byron was never the atheist which the cliché has him to be, but a man whose profound need for a faith clashed always with an equally profound scepticism.

"Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne (née Elizabeth Milbanke; 1750 ? 1818) was one of the most influential of the political hostesses of the extended Regency period, and the wife of Whig politician Peniston Lamb, 1st Viscount Melbourne. She was the mother of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom amongst several other influential children. Lady Melbourne was known not just for her political influence but also for her friendships and romantic relationships with members of London society including Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, George, Prince of Wales and Lord Byron."--Wikipedia.