All of Byron's major poems, together with his forays into prose fiction, are considered in this volume.

In Byron's Ghosts British and American scholars join together to overturn some of the prevailing assumptions that romance scholars have made about Byron, offering a fresh new reading of his poetry. Informed by recent critical theory focused on spectrality, they look at ghosts in his work, both in the conventional sense—what Mary Shelley once described as the “true, old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost”—and in a postmodern sense, one concerned with a range of phantom effects. Balancing attention on these diverse concepts of the ghost, their essays complicate the popular images of Byron as a materialist, skeptic, and anti-Romantic, revealing crucial new insights about his poetry.

A comprehensive guide to the poems, prose, biography, ideas and contexts of Byron, entries range from detailed coverage of the major poems to items on Byron's songs, conversation, interest in boxing, swimming and vampires, and sexual liaisons; also the 'Byronic Hero', Byron in fiction and drama, and his pervasive influence on subsequent literature.

This book is a thorough, eco-critical re-evaluation of Lord Byron (1789-1824), claiming him as one of the most important ecological poets in the British Romantic tradition. Using political ecology, post-humanist theory, new materialism, and ecological science, the book shows that Byron’s major poems—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the metaphysical dramas, and Don Juan—are deeply engaged with developing a cultural ecology that could account for the co-creative synergies in human and natural systems, and ground an emancipatory ecopolitics and ecopoetics scaled to address globalized human threats to socio-environmental thriving in the post-Waterloo era. In counterpointing Byron’s eco-cosmopolitanism to the localist dwelling praxis advocated by Romantic Lake poets, Byron’s Nature seeks to enlarge our understanding of the extraordinary range, depth, and importance of Romanticism’s inquiry into the meaning of nature and our ethical relation to it.

Perhaps no great poet, in any language, has suffered more than Byron from being merely read about rather than actually read. As Bernard Beatty remarks in his introduction to this important collection of essays, the popular conception of ‘Byron’ still often approximates to ‘Rupert Everett with a limp’. Reading Byron is the product and summation of nearly sixty years devoted to studying and teaching his poetry. It argues that, far from being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, Byron is serious, ethically orientated and rewarding to read. The book is in three parts: Poems – Life – Politics. Five new essays have been written especially for the first and largest section, which provides fresh perspectives on Byron’s major works. The volume continues with three of Beatty's lively lectures on unappreciated aspects of Byron the man, and three pithy essays on Byron as a complex, if not systematic, political thinker. While Beatty does not question the pre-eminent status of the ‘bright’ Don Juan, devoting a chapter to an unconventional reading of its final cantos, he argues powerfully that nineteenth-century readers, who responded on an unprecedented scale to the forceful poetic structures of the ‘dark’ Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Tales, Manfred, and Cain, were right to do so. Introduced by Jerome McGann (editor of the great Clarendon edition of the poet's works) and concluded in dialogue with Gavin Hopps (co-editor of the forthcoming Longman edition), Reading Byron is itself essential reading for any student or lover of Romantic poetry.

Byron’s Don Juan is one of the greatest poems in the English language. Byron’s friends initially agreed that ‘it will be impossible to publish this’. Byron prevailed, however, and the first two cantos were issued anonymously after much editorial revision. Even in its revised form, Don Juan was perceived as a radical attack on establishment values; the poem has remained a beacon for freedom of speech and retains its power to shock. Since it was published in 1819–24, all printed editions of the poem have used the text prepared by Byron’s publishers, John Murray and John Hunt. This is the first new text of the poem to be printed in two hundred years. The Longman edition is based on a comprehensive line-by-line analysis of the manuscripts, so the text of the poem follows Byron’s own voice, pace and pauses, rather than the grammatical punctuation and more cautious word choice inserted by his nineteenth-century editors. The Longman Don Juan has been annotated afresh, allowing readers to see where Byron left open the choice of words or rhymes, and demonstrating the extraordinary breadth and depth of his literary allusions, topical and cultural references, and socially coded jokes. Textual annotation includes reception history, extensive bibliographies and a detailed chronology, situating Don Juan in the literary, scientific, dramatic, political, musical and social life of the early nineteenth century. A detailed index to the poem and annotation provides an unparalleled resource for students and scholars.

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.

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.

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.

In this study, the author examines the evolution of Byron's poetry from Childe Harold I and II through to the composition of Beppo. Beginning with a close reading of the sustained poetic experimentation that constitutes Childe Harold I and II, he charts the progress of that experimentation in the Tales where Byron's poetry gets entrenched in a tragic idiom. The author then describes Byron's prolonged struggle to break clear of the imaginative limitations imposed by that tragic idiom and to break into a sustainable comic mode: a struggle that drives Childe Harold III, The Prisoner of Chillon, and The Dream only to culminate in success in Childe Harold IV. It is here, as Rawes demonstrates, that the path forward into the comic mode of Beppo and Don Juan is discovered. Byron's Poetic Experimentation also offers a substantial reconsideration of Byron's shifting attitude towards Wordsworthian idealism and a detailed analysis of the structured eclecticism of Manfred.