Byron in Context

Description

George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron (1788-1824), was one of the most celebrated poets of the Romantic period, as well as a peer, politician and global celebrity, famed not only for his verse, but for his controversial lifestyle and involvement in the Greek War of Independence. In thirty-seven concise, accessible essays, by leading international scholars, this volume explores the social and intertextual relationships that informed Byron's writing; the geopolitical contexts in which he travelled, lived and worked; the cultural and philosophical movements that influenced changing outlooks on religion, science, modern society and sexuality; the dramatic landscape of war, conflict and upheaval that shaped Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe and Regency Britain; and the diverse cultures of reception that mark the ongoing Byron phenomenon as a living ecology in the twenty-first century. This volume illuminates how we might think of Byron in context, but also as a context in his own right.

Clara Tuite is Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, where she is also a Co-Director and Lead Researcher with the Research Unit in Enlightenment, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture. She is the author of Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge, 2002) and Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge, 2015), which was awarded the Elma Dangerfield Prize of the International Association of Byron Societies. In 2017, she was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

'Byron in Context offers sharp distillations of the biographical, political, and cultural contexts of Byron's work. The volume also takes literary history and reception studies as crucial contexts for understanding Byron.' J. Risinger, Choice '... this book is a fine achievement that will provide a route into studying Byron for students and also give new insights for scholars in the field.' Jonathon Shears, The BARS Review 'Ultimately, though, Callaghan has hit upon an interesting point of convergence between Byron and Shelley with her discussion of the poet-hero. She is a great reader of poetry, and I learned a lot from her analyses of specific stanzas and lines in both Byron's and Shelley's works.' Alexander Grammatikos, European Romantic Review