This 2002 collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by one of the most important critics of Romanticism and Byron studies, Jerome McGann. The collection demonstrates McGann's evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian. His 'General Analytic and Historical Introduction' to the collection presents a meditation on the history of his own research on Byron, in particular how scholarly editing interacted with the theoretical innovations in literary criticism over the last quarter of the twentieth century. McGann's receptiveness to dialogic forms of criticism is also illustrated in this collection, which contains an interview and concludes with a dialogue between McGann and the editor. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now McGann's influential work on Byron can be appreciated more widely by new generations of students and scholars.
Acknowledgments; General analytical and historical introduction; Part I: 1. Milton and Byron; 2. Byron and Wordsworth; 3. Byron, mobility, and the poetics of historical ventriloquism; 4. 'My brain is feminine': Byron and the poetry of deception; 5. What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?; 6. Byron and the anonymous lyric; 7. Byron and 'the truth in masquerade'; 8. Private poetry, public deception; 9. Hero with a thousand faces: the rhetoric of Byronism; 10. Byron and the lyric of sensibility; Part II: 11. A point of reference; 12. History, herstory, theirstory, ourstory; 13. Literature, meaning, and the discontinuity of fact; 14. Rethinking romanticism; 15. An interview with Jerome McGann; 16. Poetry, 1780-1832; 17. Byron and romanticism, a dialogue (Jerome McGann and the editor, James Soderholm).
