A clear, jargon-free and comprehensible survey of a diverse and voluminous canonical British author.

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.

A fresh, concise account of the Romantic poet Lord Byron’s flamboyant life and work. In this book, David Ellis traces Lord Byron’s life from rented lodgings in Aberdeen and the crumbling splendors of Newstead Abbey to his final grand tour of Asia. Describing his exile from England as well as his subsequent travels in Italy and Greece, Ellis shows just how completely Byron’s experiences colored both his serious and comic writings, such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Corsair. This is a fresh, concise, and clear-eyed account of the flamboyant poet’s life and work.

Critics have long struggled to find a suitable category for travelogues. From its ancient origins to the present day, the travel narrative has borrowed elements from various genres - from epic poetry to literary reportage - in order to evoke distant cultures and exotic locales, and sometimes those closer to hand. Tim Youngs argues in this lucid and detailed Introduction that travel writing redefines the myriad genres it comprises and is best understood on its own terms. To this end, Youngs surveys some of the most celebrated travel literature from the medieval period until the present, exploring themes such as the quest motif, the traveler's inner journey, postcolonial travel and issues of gender and sexuality. The text culminates in a chapter on twenty-first-century travel writing and offers predictions about future trends in the genre, making this Introduction an ideal guide for today's students, teachers and travel writing enthusiasts.

The first survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life in the British Romantic period.

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.

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.

T. S. Eliot is not only one of the most important poets of the twentieth century; as literary critic and commentator on culture and society, his writing continues to be profoundly influential. Every student of English must engage with his writing to understand the course of modern literature. This book provides the perfect introduction to key aspects of Eliot's life and work, as well as to the wider contexts of modernism in which he wrote. John Xiros Cooper explains how Eliot was influenced by the intellectual climate of both twentieth-century Britain and America, and how he became a key cultural figure on both sides of the Atlantic. The continuing controversies surrounding his writing and his thought are also addressed. With a useful guide to further reading, this is the most informative and accessible introduction to T. S. Eliot.

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.

Byron’s dubious status as a sex object, and his even more dubious status as a political icon, serves to disguise the fact that he is one of the greatest of all English poets, with a European reputation second only to Shakespeare. The fact that writers such as Goethe and Pushkin held him in the highest regard ensures that the English continue to despise him, and ignore his verse as much as possible. This book ignores his sexuality, his politics, and his iconography, and concentrates on his poems. Written by leading authorities such as Bernard Beatty, Germaine Greer and Michael O’Neill, it contains essays on his verse-forms and his comic rhymes, as well as thematic analyses on such recurrent Byronic themes as the Sea, Will-o’-the-Wisps, and Love versus Knowledge. In the face of many modern books which translate his verse into prose and try without success to analyse the result, Byron’s Poetry puts his real achievement – as a creative writer – back into the focus of discussion.