In 1764 the Hon. John Byron was commissioned by the Admiralty to sail to the South Atlantic to search for Pepys's Island and the Southern Continent. He was then to continue into the Pacific itself and look for a possible North-west passage. Although he rediscovered the Falkland Islands, it was after the French had done so under Bougainville, and he made no attempt to search for a North-west passage at all, but sailed straight on round the world, making no discoveries of any importance. The journal which Byron kept during his voyage has been edited and annotated by Dr Gallagher. In his Introduction he describes earlier voyages of a similar nature and sketches the background to this voyage. He assesses Byron's achievement and considers why he disobeyed his orders. Apart from the Journal, the Admiralty's 'secret instructions' to Byron are also printed here, as well as Byron's letter to the Admiralty explaining why he was sailing straight on. There is an appendix by Dr Helen Wallis on the Patagonian giants. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1964.

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.

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.

Focusing on key members of the Pisan Circle, Byron, the Shelleys, and Leigh Hunt, Maria Schoina explores configurations of identity and the acculturating practices of British expatriates in post-Napoleonic Italy. The problems involved in British Romanticism's relations to its European 'others' are her point of departure, as she argues that the emergence and mission of what Mary Shelley termed the 'Anglo-Italian' is inextricably linked to the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of the age: the forging of the British identity in the midst of an expanding empire, the rise of the English middle class and the establishment of a competitive print culture, and the envisioning, by a group of male and female Romantic liberal intellectuals, of social and political reform.Schoina's emphasis on the political implications of the British Romantics' hyphenated self-representation results in fresh readings of the Pisan Circle's Italianate writings that move them away from interpretations focused on a purely aesthetic or poetic attachment to Italy to uncover their complex ideological underpinnings.

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.