This volume presents a facsimile of the original draft manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

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 the second decade of the nineteenth century, the British press began a campaign of critical abuse against Leigh Hunt, caricaturing the radical journalist as an upstart "Cockney" author whose literary talents were as disreputable as his politics. Lord Byron, on the other hand, was revered as a peer and a poetical genius who, the conservative press argued, would never befriend and collaborate with a writer like Hunt. Yet Byron did just that. Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement is the first full-length study of the friendship and literary relationship of two of the most important second-generation Romantic authors. Challenging long-held critical attitudes, this study shows that Byron and Hunt engaged in a creative and meaningful dialogue at each major stage in their careers, from their earliest published volumes of juvenile poetry and verse satire to their most celebrated contributions to Romantic literature: The Story of Rimini and Don Juan. Drawing upon newly recovered letters and unpublished manuscript material, this book illuminates the surprisingly durable and artistically significant friendship of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt.

English Writers - A Bibliography with Vignettes

Byron was a man of many passions, always fiercely held and defended, but his intense devotion to the poetry of Alexander Pope seemed to characterise a man standing a little to the left of the Romantic universe. While Pope largely left a taste of dust in the mouths of the Romantics, Byron continued to defend the “little Queen Anne’s man” in letters and in print as if he were arguing for the reputation of a lover; so much so that we are left to wonder, what kind of impression did the greatest poet of the eighteenth century leave upon the work of the seminal poet of the nineteenth? How far and in what way did Byron’s adoration of Pope imprint itself upon his own poetry in conscious and unconscious echoes, in parallels of thought and expression, in the unexpected, unlooked-for congruence? This book identifies and lays out the most significant strands of that influence, following them wherever they lead. Through exploring both poets’ satirical portraits of men and women, their expression of love and forbidden passion, their various poetic techniques, the influence of the Roman poet Horace, and the dual resonance of Eden and paradise in their work, a picture emerges of Pope touching the deepest recesses of Byron’s poetic thought. Amongst the particular themes discussed here are the presence of women in the lives and poetry of both men, the disentangling of the sense of alienation and exile exhibited in their authorial psyches, the significance of the doppelgänger for their satire, and a weighing of the deep contrapuntal nature of Byron’s thought, contrasting it with Pope’s. Byron and the Best of Poets is the first major study of its kind to explore these multiple aspects and to unpack them in the work of both poets.

Investigates the ways in which new technologies and theories of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media engage with a diverse set of texts by British Romantic writers. Romantic Mediations investigates the connections among British Romantic writers, their texts, and the history of major forms of technical media from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. Opening up the vital new subfield of Romantic media studies through interventions in both media archaeology and contemporary media theory, Andrew Burkett addresses the ways that unconventional techniques and theories of storage and processing media engage with classic texts by William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others. Ordered chronologically and structured by four crucial though often overlooked case studies that delve into Romanticism’s role in the histories of incipient technical media systems, the book focuses on different examples of the ways that imaginative literature and art of the period become taken up and transformed by—while simultaneously shaping considerably—new media environments and platforms of photography, phonography, moving images, and digital media. “Romantic Mediations brings contemporary media theory to major Romantic texts and their reception. Few if any scholars working in Romanticism and media have taken up the generational difference between Friedrich Kittler’s media theory and the more contemporary media archaeology of Jussi Parikka. Moreover, too often have media theories of Romanticism been restricted to digital media and screen technology. Andrew Burkett creates a new path for Romantic period scholarship by showing the potential of media archaeology for Romantic texts and their long afterlife.” — Ron Broglio, author of Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments 1750–1830

Aspects of Byron’s Don Juan is, in part, a proceedings volume from the 2012 conference held by the Newstead Byron Society at Nottingham Trent University. Speakers represented in the book include Malcolm Kelsall, Peter Cochran, Diego Saglia and Itsuyo Higashinaka. Topics range from the politics of Don Juan, and its treatment of women, to its comic rhymes. One section is devoted to the poem’s importance in the literatures of Spain and Russia, another to the vast catalogue of Byron’s prose sources (from cannibalism to cookery books), and a final section to the important role played by Mary Shelley in copying most of the poem for the printer. The editor’s introduction describes the enormous literary tradition of which Don Juan forms a vital continuation, from Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, via Rabelais, Cervantes, and Montaigne, to the novelists Sterne, Smollett and Fielding, all of whom Byron adored. Another chapter concerns the differing ways in which Don Juan has been treated by other artists, from Tirso de Molina, via E. T. A. Hoffman, to Johnny Depp.