Description
Book SynopsisPerhaps no great poet, in any language, has suffered more than Byron from being merely read about rather than actually read. As Bernard Beatty remarks in his introduction to this important collection of essays, the popular conception of ‘Byron’ still often approximates to ‘Rupert Everett with a limp’.
Reading Byron is the product and summation of nearly sixty years devoted to studying and teaching his poetry. It argues that, far from being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, Byron is serious, ethically orientated and rewarding to read. The book is in three parts: Poems – Life – Politics. Five new essays have been written especially for the first and largest section, which provides fresh perspectives on Byron’s major works. The volume continues with three of Beatty's lively lectures on unappreciated aspects of Byron the man, and three pithy essays on Byron as a complex, if not systematic, political thinker.
While Beatty does not question the pre-eminent status of the ‘bright’ Don Juan, devoting a chapter to an unconventional reading of its final cantos, he argues powerfully that nineteenth-century readers, who responded on an unprecedented scale to the forceful poetic structures of the ‘dark’ Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Tales, Manfred, and Cain, were right to do so. Introduced by Jerome McGann (editor of the great Clarendon edition of the poet's works) and concluded in dialogue with Gavin Hopps (co-editor of the forthcoming Longman edition), Reading Byron is itself essential reading for any student or lover of Romantic poetry.
Trade ReviewReviews
'This essay collection is a treasure trove containing the accumulated riches from a life of teaching and scholarship.'
Peter Graham, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Virginia Tech
‘Bernard Beatty’s Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics offers a dazzling series of insights from a venerable Byron scholar… Beatty’s work is most distinguished across these three sections by its wonderfully refined close reading… Beatty thus achieves something close to his subject: a liveliness and a distinctive voice that is eminently readable despite the complexity of his thinking. I can think of few higher compliments.’ Jonathan Sachs, Review of English Studies
‘This superb and thought-provoking book asks a lot of but offers a great deal to any reader of Byron. In Beatty's willingness to read Byron carefully, to seek and find in him ideas of depth and significance, while being able to laugh with him, we receive a blueprint for how to work with poets who, perhaps because and not in spite of their fame, have become more talked about than read. Reading Byron should become one of the cornerstones for anyone--student, scholar, or fan--who would go deeper and pay Byron's poetry the same attention that brought Beatty's work into being.’ Madeleine Callaghan, Review 19
‘Beatty is intent on tracing in the poems what he calls a “Catholic trajectory”, a learning curve that takes Byron deeper and deeper into the recesses of the human soul. He offers, among other things, compelling accounts of “the darkness of sin” in “Lara” and the unexpected orthodoxy of Byron’s play Cain, usually characterized as a sceptic’s charter... Beatty writes throughout with enviable lucidity and expository grace, while allowing himself a few moments of the senior clubman.’ Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement
Table of ContentsIntroduction (by Jerome McGann)
Author's Preface
1.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Types of History
2. Acts of Will: Byron's
Lara
3. Understanding
Manfred: The Sense of an Ending
4.
Cain: One Drama, Two Theologies
5. Empty Spaces in
Don Juan: A Reading of the Norman Abbey Cantos
6. 1814: Byron at Albany
7. 1816: Byron at Seaham
8. 1819: From Venice to Ravenna
9. Byron, Liberty and Licence
10. Byron and the Paradoxes of Nationalism
11. Byron as Political Icon
12. Bernard Beatty in Conversation with Gavin Hopps
