Description
Book SynopsisByron is rarely thought of as a spiritual writer. However, as this bold new collection shows, this is the result of an impoverished notion of the ‘spiritual’ and a reflection of biased priorities in Romantic studies. Reflecting on the poet’s claim that ‘immaterialism’s a serious matter’, this interdisciplinary collection of essays, from British and American scholars, calls into question the prevailing ‘materialist’ consensus, and offers a fresh and theoretically inflected reading of Byron’s poetry. Byron’s Ghosts is the first book-length examination of spectrality in Byron’s work. It is on the one hand concerned with what Mary Shelley in her essay ‘On Ghosts’ refers to as ‘the true old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost’, though it is also a postmodern response to the ‘spectral turn’ in critical theory, which brings into view a range of phantom effects and ‘non-Gothic’ spectres. Focusing attention on these diverse modalities of the ghostly, the specially assembled essays complicate the popular image of Byron as a sceptical or ‘anti-Romantic’ poet and reveal a great deal about his work that could not be uncovered in any other way.
Trade Review'This is a strong collection of essays on an excellent, and original, topic.
Byron's Ghosts manifestly enhances and modifies our understanding of Byron.'
Alan Rawes
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Texts and Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Re-Enchantment of Romanticism
- Chapter 1: Determining Unknown Modes of Being: A Map of Byron’s Ghosts and Spirits
- BERNARD BEATTY
- Chapter 2: S hades of Being: Byron and the Trespassing of Ontology
- GAVIN HOPPS
- Chapter 3: Byron and the Noonday Demons
- MARY HURST
- Chapter 4: Conjuration and Exorcism: Byron’s Spectral Rhetoric
- DALE TOWNSHEND
- Chapter 5: Byron avec Sade: Material and Spectral Violence in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto
- PIYA PAL-LAPINSKI
- Chapter 6: ‘’Twixt Life and Death’: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan and the Sublime
- PHILIP SHAW
- Chapter 7: Byron, Ann Radcliffe and the Religious Implications of the Explained Supernatural in Don Juan
- ALISON MILBANK
- Chapter 8: The Haunting of Don Juan
- PETER W. GRAHAM
- Chapter 9: Being neither Here nor There: Byron and the Art of Flirtation
- CORIN THROSBY
- Afterword: Blowing on a Dead Man’s Embers: Byron’s Biographical Ghosts
- PETER ALLENDER
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
