This study of Byron’s last complete long poem, the comparatively neglected The Island, is the first to devote a whole book to the examination, contextualization and motivation of both the poetry and its poet. It is much more than just a monograph, however; aside from biographical considerations, it illumines aspects of study that embrace feminism, racial politics and social considerations in relation to Polynesian island society, all of which are contrasted with the loose anarchy of an eighteenth century group of British mutineers. Two historical contexts – the infamous 1789 mutiny on the Bounty and Byron’s life in the year that led up to the poem’s composition – serve as an extended prelude to a deep analysis of the major symbols and characters in the poem, while its main chapters range beyond The Island, conducting a literary conversation with Shakespeare, Pope, 18th-century writers of memoirs and nautical sea history, classical authors and even Chinese poets, as well as other Romantic poets. Consideration is given to aspects of racial and feminist theory in relation to the poem’s extraordinary central female character; in particular there is a focus on her promotion of the poem’s happy ending, one that is quite unique in Byron’s oeuvre. The Appendix contains the first-ever published transcript of the holograph of the poem, allowing readers to appreciate Byron’s idiosyncratic and expressive punctuation—as well as his first thoughts before editing.

Deeply informed and appealingly written, this revised and updated second edition gives fresh life to the enthralling sexual, poetic and political contradictions that make Byron the first literary celebrity. An authoritative source for students, this companion also points to emerging new areas of research.

The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron offers the latest in critical thinking about the poet that defined the Romantic era across Europe and beyond. The volume presents forty-four groundbreaking essays that enable readers to assess Lord Byron's central position in Romantic traditions and his profound and far-reaching influence on British, European, and world culture. The chapters are organized into five sections-'Works', 'Biographical Contexts', 'Literary and Cultural Contexts', 'Afterlives', and 'Reading Byron Now'-that guide readers through the most important issues and frameworks for interpreting Byron. 'Works' presents original readings of Byron's key works and many of his lesser-known ones, giving space to extensive studies of his great epic, Don Juan, and the poem that brought him fame, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'Biographical Contexts' invites readers to consider Byron's life through key themes and patterns. 'Literary and Cultural Contexts' sets out the most important intellectual traditions from which Byron's work emerged and in which it developed. 'Afterlives' shows readers the extent of Byron's influence on literature, art, music, and politics in Europe and beyond. 'Reading Byron Now' advances the critical agendas that are shaping Byron Studies today. The Handbook tackles key themes associated with Byron including the Byronic Hero, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, sexuality, mobility, scepticism, the Gothic, celebrity culture, and much more. For new readers of Byron, the volume provides an excellent grounding in his life and work, and for specialists, it opens up exciting new approaches to an icon of Romantic literature.

Planetary spaces such as the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions captured the British imperial imagination. Intangible, inhospitable, or inaccessible, these blank spaces—what Siobhan Carroll calls "atopias"—existed beyond the boundaries of known and inhabited places. The eighteenth century conceived of these geographic outliers as the natural limits of imperial expansion, but scientific and naval advances in the nineteenth century created new possibilities to know and control them. This development preoccupied British authors, who were accustomed to seeing atopic regions as otherworldly marvels in fantastical tales. Spaces that an empire could not colonize were spaces that literature might claim, as literary representations of atopias came to reflect their authors' attitudes toward the growth of the British Empire as well as the part they saw literature playing in that expansion. Siobhan Carroll interrogates the role these blank spaces played in the construction of British identity during an era of unsettling global circulations. Examining the poetry of Samuel T. Coleridge and George Gordon Byron and the prose of Sophia Lee, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens, as well as newspaper accounts and voyage narratives, she traces the ways Romantic and Victorian writers reconceptualized atopias as threatening or, at times, vulnerable. These textual explorations of the earth's highest reaches and secret depths shed light on persistent facets of the British global and environmental imagination that linger in the twenty-first century.