This 2002 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.

"Romanticism - and Byron" is a book in two parts. In the first part, Dr Cochran examines "Romanticism" and shows that it is a word meaning anything, and therefore nothing. It is an academic construct created by academics, and has no basis in the writings of the early nineteenth century. Its continued use, argues Dr Cochran, is a modern marketing phenomenon solely. In the second part, Dr Cochran examines the life and work of Byron in the non-"romantic" context of his contemporaries. He shows how Byron's antithetical nature created problems when he was forced into compromising situations with friends who were close to parts of his mind, yet irreconcilable with one another. This "mobility", argues Cochran, was often an embarrassment for Byron's social life, but of great benefit to his creativity. This part of the book features chapters on Shelley, Scott, Blake, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and is notable for the amount of original archive documentation with which Cochran illustrates his theme.

This text examines Byron's "lordship" - his singularity as a literary success and as one of the great British aristocratic poets. Drawing on contemporary literary, political and social theory, this study of Byron also re-examines the romanticism of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Hazlitt and Shelley.

This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture. It investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.

Often seen as the exception to generalisations about Romanticism, Byron's poetry - and its intricate relationship with a brilliant, scandalous life - has remained a source of controversy throughout the twentieth century. This book brings together recent work on Byron by leading British and American scholars and critics, guiding undergraduate students and sixth-form pupils through the different ways in which new literary theory has enriched readings of Byron's work, and showing how his poetry offers a rewarding focus for questions about the relationship between historical contexts and literary form in the Romantic period. Diverse and fresh perspectives on canonical texts such as Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred are included together with stimulating analyses of less well-known narrative poems, lyrics and dramas. A clearly structured introduction traces key developments in Byron criticism and locates the essays within wider debates in Romantic studies. Detailed headnotes to each essay and a guide to further reading help to orientate the reader and offer pointers for further discussion. The collection will enable students of English literature, Romantic studies and nineteenth-century cultural studies to assess the contribution that different critical methodologies have made to our understanding of individual poems by Byron, as well as concepts like the Byronic hero and evolving definitions of Romanticism.

Jane Stabler offers the first full-scale examination of Byron's poetic form in relation to historical debates of his time. Responding to recent studies of publishing and audiences in the Romantic period, Stabler argues that Byron's poetics developed in response to contemporary cultural history and his reception by the English reading public. Drawing on extensive new archive research into Byron's correspondence and reading, Stabler traces the complexity of the intertextual dialogues that run through his work. For example, Stabler analyses Don Juan alongside Galignani's Messenger - Byron's principal source of news about British politics while in Italy - and refers to hitherto unpublished letters between Byron's publishers and his friends to reveal a powerful impulse among his contemporaries to direct his controversial poetic style to their own conflicting political ends. This fascinating study will be of interest to Byronists and, more broadly, to scholars of Romanticism in general.