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Galignani's Messenger - Byron's principal source of news about British politics while in Italy - and refers to hitherto unpublished letters between Byron's publishers and his friends to reveal a powerful impulse among his contemporaries to direct his controversial poetic style to their own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.

This is a collection of essays on Lord Byron's writings. Topics range from Byron's reception in other cultures and histories, to Byron's unique conception of history, to essays dealing with his personal history, and the usage of Byron's works in cultural history writ large. There are also papers dealing with how Byron has been held up as an exceptional writer whose work has been emulated for many years. As history remains cyclical, Byron's compelling imagery serves as descriptive of destruction, regeneration, and the unyielding predicaments of modern life.

This new study of Byron explores the 'geo-historical' - places where historically significant events have occurred. Cheeke examines the ways in which the notion of being there becomes the central claim and shaping force in Byron's poetry up to 1818. He goes on to explore the concept of being in-between which characterises Byron's 1818-21 poetry. Finally, Byron's complex nostalgia for England, his sense of having been there , is read in relation to a broader critique of memory, home-sickness and place-attachment.

In her study of the relationship between Byron’s lifelong interest in historical matters and the development of history as a discipline, Carla Pomarè focuses on drama (the Venetian plays, The Deformed Transformed), verse narrative (The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa) and dramatic monologue (The Prophecy of Dante), calling attention to their interaction with historiographical and pseudo-historiographical texts ranging from monographs to dictionaries, collections of apophthegms, autobiographies and prophecies. This variety of discourses, Pomarè suggests, not only served as a source of the historical information Byron cherished, providing the subject matter for countless episodes in his works, but also and primarily supplied him with epistemological models. From them, Byron drew such trademark textual practices as his massive use of notes and paratexts, which satisfied his ingrained need for ’authenticity’ - a sentiment expressed in his oft-quoted, ’I hate things all fiction’. As Pomarè argues, Byron’s meticulous tracing of the process that links events, documents and historical representations ultimately answers his desire to retrieve what might be lost during the transmission of historical knowledge. Thus does he betray his preoccupation with the ideological uses of history writing, projecting his own discourses of history into the present of their composition.