About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherCambridge University Press

ISBN-101009232959

ISBN-139781009232951

eBay Product ID (ePID)6058381727

Product Key Features

Book TitleByron and the Poetics of Adversity

Number of Pages150 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2022

TopicEuropean / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

IllustratorYes

GenreLiterary Criticism

AuthorJerome J. Mcgann

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.7 in

Item Length7.6 in

Item Width5.1 in

Additional Product Features

LCCN2022-020709

Dewey Edition23/eng/20220428

Reviews'A new book by Jerome McGann is an event, though there have been many such events over his long career. But a new book by him about Byron is a special kind of event. No other scholar has done as much for Byron as McGann has, and few living scholars as much for any single author as he has done for Byron. This book marks a kind of return to origins since, like McGann's first book, Fiery Dust, this one focuses on Byron's work before Don Juan. The new emphasis, however, falls on Byron's relationship to language and poetic craft and on how it differs from that of his major contemporaries. Playful, allusive, and itself 'adverse,' McGann's style in this book, like Byron's own, means to set our language free.' James K. Chandler, William K. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, 'McGann's style is vivid and animated, exuberant even ... [he] makes the reader feel, while immersed, that nothing could be more important than the task in hand ... he writes not only to evoke poetic excellences, but also to make a timely intervention ... You may not always agree with his diagnosis of what needs to be done, but you never end a piece by McGann without feeling that you've been put through your paces and are better for it.' Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement

Dewey Decimal821/.7

Table Of Content1. Don Juan and the English language; 2. Byron Agonistes, 1809-1816; 3. Manfred: one word for mercy; 4. Byron and the 'Wrong Revolutionary Poetical System'; 5. Byron, Blake, and the adversity of poetics; 6. The stubborn foe: bad verse and the poetry of action.

SynopsisUpending traditional Byron criticism to reveal a more relentlessly precise and skeptical poetic mind than ever previously thought, Jerome McGann offers numerous close readings of Byron's verse alongside that of his contemporaries to show how he challenged the limits of poetry and exposed the illusions and contradictions of his age., A long line of traditional, often conservative, criticism and cultural commentary deplored Byron as a slipshod poet. This pithy yet aptly poetic book, written by one of the world's foremost Romantic scholars, argues that assessment is badly mistaken. Byron's great subject is what he called 'Cant': the habit of abusing the world through misusing language. Setting up his poetry as a laboratory to investigate failures of writing, reading, and thinking, Byron delivered sharp critical judgment on the costs exacted by a careless approach to his Mother Tongue. Perspicuous readings of Byron alongside some of his Romantic contemporaries - Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley - reveal Byron's startling reconfiguration of poetry as a 'broken mirror' and shattered lamp. The paradoxical result was to argue that his age's contradictions, and his own, offered both ethical opportunities and a promise of poetic - broadly cultural - emancipation. This book represents a major contribution to ideas about Romanticism.

LC Classification NumberPR4392.P63M34 2023