Byron, 1998

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE , TRANSLATED

Byron, George Gordon. Journal de Ravenne; accompagné de Pensées détachées; et suivi de Journal de Céphalonie et de Missolonghi. Paris: J. Corti, 1998.

Nicholson, Andrew, ed. Poems 1807-1824 and Beppo: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscripts in the British Library and in the Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public Library. Vol. 12 of The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Lord Byron, ed. Donald H. Reiman. New York & London: Garland P, 1998.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO BYRON

America's Intervention in the Balkans: A Collection of Papers Presented at the Lord Byron Foundation's Third Annual Conference Devoted to U.S. Policy in Southeast Europe Held in Chicago in March 1997. London; Aiken, S.C.: The Foundation, 1998.

Baldick, Chris. "Monsters of Empire: Conrad and Lawrence." In Critical Essays on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Mary Lowe-Evans (New York: G. K. Hall; London: Prentice, 1998), 185-202. Reprinted from In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing, by Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987).

Baldick explores similarities between Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein, but sees Conrad as limited compared to D. H. Lawrence. Baldick "discovers in Lawrence an abiding, culturally induced mistrust of polar exploration that directly opposes the enthusiasms of Frankenstein's narrator Robert Walton" (17). In Women in Love, Lawrence seems to employ a "vocabulary of geographical symbols derived from the Shelley-Byron circle's Alpine obsessions to attack modern imperialism" (17).

Batten, Guinn. The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998.

An introduction on romantic melancholy and commodity culture, with chapters on "Byron's In-Between Art of Ennui: 'The World is Full of Orphans'" (21-71) and "Shelley's Absent Fathers: 'The Awful Shadow of Some Unseen Power'" (119-48). Other chapters discuss Blake's The Four Zoas and Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude. Batten explores the fact that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats lost at least one parent early in life and both before becoming adults. "Byron, like his self-styled Cain, digressively and obsessively returned as a poet to the scene of his parents' fall into mortality, to ruined estates and squandered legacies for whose loss Byron and Cain blame their antecedents, but especially their Father" (27). "Whether Shelley pursued an ideal other in a father figure or an ideal Other in some version of idealism," Batten argues in her reading of Alastor, "he consistently found that such pursuits left him, literally and palpably, with 'nothing'" (133). Batten discusses Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, photocopies of manuscripts of Don Juan, Cain, and his letters, as well as Shelley's Alastor, "Mont Blanc," "Eyes: A Fragment," and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," among other works.

Discusses ideology and its "logic of exchange" by considering Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, Black Sun, Tales of Love, and Revolution in Poetic Language; Judith Butler's Gender Trouble; and Slavoj Zizek's The Metases of Enjoyment.

Close readings of Byron's Childe Harold (34-36), Don Juan (45-71), and Cain (37-45), as well as Hours of Idleness (50) and The Prisoner of Chillon (36); readings of Alastor (133-40), "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (119-24), and "Mont Blanc" (141-48); general discussion (119-30) of Prometheus Unbound (120,131) and The Triumph of Life (120); discusses Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" (220-36), letters (234-35), "Ode to a Nightingale" (216-36), "To Autumn" (234), and "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be" (235).

Brewer, William D. "Unnationalized Englishmen in Mary Shelley's Fiction." RoN 11 (Aug. 1998): <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1998/v/n11/005812ar.html>.

Discusses Mary Shelley's novels Lodore (1835), Mathilda (1819), Falkner (1837), and The Fortunes of Perin Warbeck (1830), and Godwin's Fleetwood. Brewer sees Lord Raymond as a Byron-surrogate in Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and Clairmont saw Lodore as a "<beastly> modification of the beastley character of Lord Byron." Brewer argues that Valperga, The Last Man, Lodore, and Falkner "take the Byronic hero as their central characters" (31).

Bruhm, Steven. "Reforming Byron's Narcissism." In Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998), 429-47.

Explores the relationship between homosexuality and narcissism in Manfred and The Deformed Transformed, as well as "To Thyrza," "Epitaph to a Friend," and Byron's translation of the Nisus and Euryalus episode from Virgil's Aeneid. As Freud would write, homosexuals "are plainly seeking themselves as a love object" (14:88). Bruhm takes issue with Mellor and Christensen. In Manfred, "Byron may not be demonstrating his masculine Romanticism or his narcissistic 'murder' of his sister so much as he may be singling a destructive version of heterosexual desire that is predicated on a denial of same-sexual desire; in Byron's book-learned sexuality, love of the other sex is a late adjunct to the love of the same" (432). Discusses the legend of Narcissus in Ovid and Plato.

Bruhm argues for the "homophilic narcissism of Manfred's first part, and the heterosexual passion in parts 2 and 3 (although the binary opposition between homo and hetero identity was not operative for Byron)" (442).

Buttery, David. "Lord Byron's Account at Hoare's Bank." BJ 26 (1998): 98-103.

Chalk, Aidan. "'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt' and the Influence of Local Attachment." TSLL Language 40.1 (Spring 1998): 48-77.

Childe Harold's Spenserian stanza reflects local affiliations with poets he admired. Chalk discusses the popularity of the Spenserian form, leading up to the date that Byron began his Romaunt: "for Byron the form carried ambivalent local associations of status and identity."

Cheeke, Stephen. "Shelley, Byron, and the Maniac Poetics." KSR 12 (1998): 131-46.

Cheeke discusses Byron's The Lament of Tasso, Shelley's fragment of a drama based on Tasso, "To Byron," and "Julian and Maddalo" in order to explore each poet's treatment of madness as a metaphor and reality; specific reference is made to Plato's Ion, which also explores the trope of madness. Both writers were interested in the "self-dispossessing inspiration" connected with poetic creation (134).

Clubbe, John. "Dramatic Hits: Napoleon and Shakespeare in Byron's 1813-1814 Journal." In British Romantics as Readers: Intertextualities, Maps of Misreading, Reinterpretations; Festschrift fur Horst Meller, ed. Michael Gassenmeier, Petre Bridzun, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Eric Pointner (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 271-94. See No. 140.

Clubbe examines Byron's 1813-1814 Journal to show how his references to Shakespeare are influenced by Napoleon's Campaign of France, which took place between February and March 1814, and by Byron's awareness of Shakespeare as represented on the stage by Edmund Kean. "By his spectacular 'hits' on the world stage, both in life and in art, Napoleon redefined and pricked forward Byron's own image of greatness" (289).

The Compleat Silver Lining: 26 Distinguished Actors Read 41 of Their Favorite Poems. Audiocassette. BMP, Ltd., 1998.

Includes readings of Keats's "To Autumn" (Simon Ward), "A Thing of Beauty" (James Earl Jones), and "Sonnet to Sleep" (Patrick Stewart); Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" (David Warner); and Shelley's "Ozymandias" (John Standing) and "Indian Serenade" (David Warner).

Crawford, Barry Craig. "Saul among the Prophets: The Thematology of King Saul (David, Samuel 1)." Ph.D. diss., U. of California, Riverside, 1998, DAI, 59-09A (1998): 3441, 286 pages.

This dissertation uses revisionist and structural methodologies to explore themes raised by Samuel 1 in music, the fine arts, and literature. Includes a discussion of works by John Lydgate, Jean de la Taille, fresco painters at Dura Europos, Byzantine book illuminators, G. F. Handel, Voltaire, Vittorio Alfieri, Lamartine, Byron, Browning, Gide, Rilke, and D. H. Lawrence.

Crompton, Louis. Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England. 1985. Reprint. Swaffham, Eng.: Gay Men's P, 1998.

Daly, Kirsten. "'Worlds beyond England': Don Juan and the Legacy of Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism." Romanticism 4.2 (1998): 189-202.

Daly reads Byron's Don Juan as a licentious version of Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Lois (1748); Byron presents the reader with an "ironic cosmopolitanism," thus reflecting on the demise of the Enlightenment ideal after the French Revolution. "An attempt to justify his existence as a citizen of the world to English society at a time when the dominant mode of national identity was sober and patriotic" (198). "I situate L'Esprit des Lois as one of the poem's Edenic origins, to which the narrative of Juan is counterpoised as a fallen reality in both an absolute and historical sense" (192). The poem "reenacts the fantasy of freedom embedded in Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, and, reinterpreting this as a comic transcription of national identity, it deftly negotiates the complexities of Byron's position as one of Romanticism's last world citizens" (199).

Dunning, Jennifer. "A Ballet Whose Finale Is a Rousing Shipwreck." New York Times, June 19, 1998, E6.

Review of the American Ballet Theater's production of Le Corsaire, a three-act Russian ballet based on Byron's poem.

Earl, E. M. Byron and Southey, Vision of Judgement. Salzburg, Aus.; Portland, Oreg.: U of Salzburg, 1998.

England, A. B. "Byron's Don Juan and the Quest for Deliberate Action." KSJ 47 (1998): 33-62.

England takes issue with Jerome Christensen's reading of Fitz-Fulke's indeterminacy in Lord Byron's Strength. For England, Juan is a figure who becomes progressively more deliberate in his actions, following Godwin's dictum that a man "ought to be upon all occasions prepared to render a reason" for his actions (England, 33; Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 127-28).

Evans, David Andrew. "Poets and Warriors: Constructions of Heroism in Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, 1789-1815." Ph.D. diss., Ohio State U, 1998, DAI, 59-01A (1998): 181.

Evans focuses on heroism as defined by British martial figures that emerged from the British wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Evans shows how "non-Byronic conceptions of heroism were vital to contemporary political discourse." Issues related to the domestic sphere influenced contemporary conceptions of heroism to a greater degree than previously realized. Like Burke, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge viewed the nation as an extension of the family: "their changing political views were consistently informed by and reflective of the high value they placed on stable households." Evans discusses the intersection of poet, hero, home, and nation-state to broaden "current notions of Romantic-era heroism."

Fleming, Anne. The Myth of the Bad Lord Byron. Cuckfield: Old Forge P, 1998.

Franklin, Caroline. "'Some Samples of the Finest Orientalism': Byronic Philhellenism and Proto-Zionism at the Time of the Congress of Vienna." In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, by Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 221-42.

Franklin points out that Byron "has proved a trickier writer to fit into the binary model of Said's thesis than government polemicists like . . . Robert Southey" (221). Franklin finds Said's Foucauldian model "too monolithic" in her discussion of The Siege of Corinth (1816) and Hebrew Melodies (1815). These works were published "when Europe's boundaries were being redrawn with the defeat of Napoleon," while The Giaour "coincided with parliament's review of the Charter of the East India Company and debate over whether missionaries should be allowed to preach Christianity in India" (223). Byron's "Oriental" tales "experiment with point of view to confound readerly expectations" (223). Byron's national aspirations for Greece and Israel were in opposition to British foreign policy "which since 1791 had been to prop up the declining Ottoman Empire in order to keep open the route to India, and prevent the ambitions of Napoleonic France, Russia and Austria of extending their influence to the Mediterranean" (228).

Goldweber, David E. "Byron and Gifford." KSR 12 (1998): 105-30.

Goldweber notes how Byron's return to satire in The Vision of Judgment and Don Juan follows Gifford's example. Gifford's "An Essay on the Roman Satirists" appeared alongside his "Life of Juvenal" (1802) and Byron is in partial agreement with Gifford when he writes English Bards, a poem closer to Juvenal than to Horace, and Hints from Horace (1811). Byron sees himself as an English Horace. "Both Byron and Gifford . . . attack their critic-foes for what might be considered any critic's greatest vice: bias towards their subjects that is indulged so as to attain personal stature" (111). Massinger's The Renegado (1629) is explored for its influence on Byron's use of the term in Don Juan, The Siege of Corinth, and The Vision of Judgment.

Goldweber, David E. "'Without Losing the Past': Byron and the Conservative Critic (Lord Byron, Poetry)." Ph.D. diss., New York U, 1998, DAI, 58-12A (1998): 4665, 279 pages.

This dissertation compares Byron's critical judgments with those of Burke, Gifford, Jeffrey, and the Anti-Jacobin satirists in order to illuminate Byron's attitudes towards his fellow poets and towards himself. "The mature Byron values tradition over newness, experience over speculation, society over isolation, reform over revolution. He aims at preserving and improving old ideas, not at discarding or subverting them."

Graham, Peter W. Lord Byron. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Graham's book places Byron's works in biographical, historical, and social context. After briefly sketching Byron's life, Graham considers Byron's works in six chapters according to their genre. He updates Trueblood's previous study (1977) and draws on Marchand's edition of Byron's letters and McGann's edition of his poetry. Interesting reference is made to a double portrait by Joni Pienkowski titled "Byron East and West." Chapters on "Byron's Life and Legend," "Lyric Poems," "Satires," "Tales," "Dramatic Poems," "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," and "Don Juan," as well as a "Selected Bibliography."

Grime, Jeffrey J. "Byron's 'The Destruction of Sennacherib.'" Exp 56.2 (Winter 1998): 70-72.

The writer traces the theme of homosexuality in Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib." He pays particular attention to meter and imagery.

Gross, Jonathan David, ed. Byron's "Corbeau Blanc": The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne. 2^nd ed.. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1998.

Gross, Jonathan David. "Byron's Gay Narrator in Don Juan." ERR 9:3 (summer 1998): 323-50.

A previously unpublished poem in the Morning Chronicle, written "To the Memory of Charles Skinner Matthews," provides insight into Byron's complex narrative devices in Don Juan. Gross argues that Byron uses coded language to subvert the heterosexual myth his poem ostensibly celebrates. Byron's narrator betrays an erotic relationship to the very hero whose adventures he describes.

Hawkins, Ann Rachelle. "Order, Community, and Astarte: Revising Shakespeare in Byron's Manfred." Ph.D. diss., U of Kentucky, 1997, DAI, 58-9 (1998): 3537.

Places Manfred not "in a biographical context, but in the intertextual contexts the poem's internal allusions create." Explores Manfred's relationship to Renaissance forebears: examines the alchemical basis of Byron's use of the magus, spirit realms, and destinies, particularly Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Tempest; explores the "interplay between Renaissance politics of hierarchy and Romantic dramas of the individual"; discusses the relationship between Manfred's soliloquies and Hamlet's; and discusses the importance of Astarte as a reflection of "the relationship between the male-self and the female-other in the search for peace or reconciliation."

Hoagwood, Terence Allan, and Daniel P. Watkins, eds. British Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London: Associated UP, 1998.

This volume "intentionally gravitates toward discussion of lesser-known works of the period, rather than such major dramas as Manfred or Prometheus Unbound, because the poetic dramas by Byron and Shelley have already been the subject of many useful historicist investigations, and because lesser-known works--for instance, the dramas of Scott, Wordsworth's Borderers, and the many revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dramas of the period--provide avenues into historical and ideological issues that cannot be adequately addressed by exclusive attention to dramas long recognized as canonical" (15). Many of these essays were previously published in Wordsworth Circle (Kucich, Johnston, and Nicholes), though some have been revised (Hoagwood, Ferriss).

Hofkosh, Sonia. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Includes chapters titled "Introduction: Invisible Girls," "A Woman's Profession: Sexual Difference and the Romance of Authorship," "The Writer's Ravishment: Byron's Body Politics," "Classifying Romanticism: The Milliner Girl and the Magazines," "Disfiguring Economies: Mary Shelley's Gift-Book Stories," "The Author's Progress: William Hazlitt's Keswick Escapade and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal," and "Romanticism in the Drawing Room: Austen's Interiority."

Hofkosh's third chapter, "Classifying Romanticism: The Milliner Girl and the Magazines," briefly considers the periodical press lampoon of Leigh Hunt as "King of the Cockneys" (66). "Invisible girls are scripted into romantic tradition in particularly material configurations--as bodies, among objects, like books, in the marketplace--even as they appear to be overlooked or, what may amount to the same thing, looked over" (3). She discusses Byron's letter to Walter Scott describing the circumstances that attended his dedication to Scott of Cain. Both Keats and Byron owed their literary fame to the very Bluestockings they despised and who read them (54). In her chapter on Mary Shelley, "Disfiguring Economies," Hofkosh turns her attention to Mary Shelley's writings for annual gift books. "Between the death of Percy Bysshe in 1822 and the death of Sir Timothy in 1844, Shelley supplements the subsistence income her father-in-law begrudgingly lends her out of her son's future estate by writing short stories, many for such annual gift books as The Keepsake and Heath's Book of Beauty." Hofkosh argues that "these narratives explicate in their various frames Shelley's negotiations between two economies of value--of authority, authorship, self--in which the body, especially the female body, is inseparably implicated. Shelley's stories respond on the one hand to an aristocratic economy of patrilinear inheritance and, on the other hand, she recognizes an economics of the marketplace, what Percy Bysshe called 'the shop interest'" (86) wherein production disfigures the writer.

In her chapter on William Hazlitt's Keswick escapade and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal, Hofkosh discusses Hazlitt's "unwanted advances to a village girl" (104). In his failed effort to seduce a woman in the Lake District, Hazlitt emerges as the proud author of An Essay on the Principle of Human Action (1805), a book he proudly claimed no woman "would ever comprehend the meaning of" (104). Sarah Hazlitt's Journal of My Trip to Scotland is the subject of Hofkosh's concluding remarks. "In the heterosexual economy within which she must inevitably function--whether single, married, or divorced--the woman may never conclude that she is her own except in contesting the very oppositions which define her" (117). Sarah Hazlitt is forced to lie about having no "collusion in the divorce proceedings" (117). The law conspires to make her a liar by making "perjury, like divorce, a practical necessity of her compromised position" (118).

Jones, Chris. "The Sensual Side (Only) of Lord Byron." Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1998, 23.

Review of a local production of Romulus Linney's play, Childe Byron, which follows the sexual exploits of Byron.

Kelsall, Malcolm. "'Once Did She Hold the Gorgeous East in Fee . . .': Byron's Venice and Oriental Empire." In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 243-61.

Kelsall discusses Beppo, Childe Harold IV, and "Venice: An Ode." "If we are to 'rethink historicism,' one of our first tasks should be to read history. It is clear that the foundations of education for the ruling orders in Britain . . . were in the literatures of classical imperialism" (247). In discussing Byron's work, one must "jettison the kind of baggage with which terms like 'imperial' or 'colonial' are now loaded, and to remain aware how contested they were then" (248). The Venetian republic was "one frontier between Occidental and Oriental imperialisms" (248). Byron's "Venetian poems are a series of meditations on the extinction of the republic" (248).

Kucich, Greg. "'A Haunted Ruin': Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment." In British Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays, ed. Terence Allan Hoagwood and Daniel P. Watkins (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London: Associated UP, 1998), 56-83.

Kucich argues that the very success of London's nineteenth-century playhouse drove Romantic writers away from it (58). Among other topics, he explores the elitist implications of Shelley's and Byron's experiments in closet drama and seeks to explain why Beddoes and Keats felt "uneasy about their dramatic ambitions" (77).

Kutcher, Matthew Lawrence. "Flowers of Friendship: Gift Books and Polite Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain." Ph.D. diss., U of Michigan, 1998, DAI, 59:10 (1998): 3830.

This dissertation explores the ways in which gift books and annuals shaped "class-based reformation of Christmas and New Year's celebrations." Rudolph Ackermann's Forget Me Not was the first gift book to appear in London and influenced readers in the rhetoric and ideological norms of "a polite gift-giving culture." Later versions appealed to "the imperial, racial, and class ideologies of the British bourgeoisie." Kutcher explores the use of humor in a second generation of annuals and the poets who define that second generation, particularly Lord Byron. A final chapter explores Letitia Elizabeth Landon's efforts to subvert the cultural practice of gift books when gift book editors tried to expand the size of their bourgeois readership.

LaChance, Charles. "Calvinistic Naturalism in Byron's Corsair & Manfred." BJ 26 (1998): 57-67.

LaChance, Charles. "Don Juan, 'A Problem, Like All Things.'" PLL 34.3 (Summer 1998): 273-301.

"The writer discusses George Byron's Don Juan as a burlesque romance along the theme of unmitigated skeptical nihilism. He points out that the main difficulty with the text is nihilism, the devaluation of all values. All of the major Western ideologies, such as materialistic naturalism, liberal sentimentality, Calvinistic Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and platonic rationality and heroics ... are subverted in Byron's text. He contends that this subversion voices unmitigated nihilism, an erosion of all received values, indicating no objective or universal ground is possible by which any value could be favored and held sacrosanct."

Lew, Joseph W. "The Plague of Imperial Desire: Montesquieu, Gibbon, Brougham, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man." In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 261-78.

Lew argues against an autobiographical reading of The Last Man, claiming that the novel was not composed solely because of Byron's death. Such a reading "cannot account for Shelley's marvelous transformation of Byron's rather inglorious death at Missolonghi"; Shelley allows this character's death to introduce the plague into Europe. Lew examines writings by Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Brougham, eighteenth-century theorists of corruption, despotism, and imperialism, "to elucidate Shelley's specifically Romantic anxieties about the dangers of Oriental 'infection' for individual bodies and for the body politic" (262).

Lloyd-Jones, Ralph. "The 'Boatswain' Mystery." BJ 26 (1998): 91-103.

Loewe, Carl. Lieder & Balladen. Vol. 9. CPO, 1998. Sound recording. Includes musical settings for poems by Byron.

Lopez, Debbie. "'Ungraspable Phantoms': Keats's Lamia and Melville's Yillah." In Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, ed. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler (South Carolina: Camden House, 1998), 159-71.

Lopez imagines an encounter with "a hideously fat Byron (now reconciled with his wife), a politically converted Shelley, and a dead Wordsworth" to show Keats's struggle in writing "Lamia." Keats's Lamia is not only a female demon but also a fabulous monster, perhaps the "monster" of Romanticism itself (6).

Makdisi, Saree. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Makdisi argues that England's process of universal empire has to be understood in global terms, beyond the British and European viewpoint, and that developments in India, Africa, and the Arab world (up to and including our own time) enable us to understand more fully the texts and contexts of British Romanticism. The book is divided as follows: "Introduction: Universal Empire," "Home Imperial: Wordsworth's London and the Spot of Time," "Wordsworth and the Image of Nature," "Waverley and the Cultural Politics of Dispossession," "Domesticating Exoticism: Transformations of Britain's Orient, 1785-1835," "Beyond the Realm of Dreams: Byron, Shelley, and the East," "William Blake and Universal Empire," and "Conclusions". "The Oriental space developed in Alastor represents a reclamation of an Oriental terrain from previous visions and versions of the East and its incorporation into the emergent space-time of modernity. Thus it not only anticipates the paradigms of Orientalist discourse associated both with James Mill [in History of British India] and with late nineteenth-century English Orientalists (many of whom were inspired by Mill's History) but it contributes to the historical production of the Orient as a space for European knowledge, discipline, and control. The version of the Orient that is produced in Childe Harold II--the Orient as refuge from and potential alternative to modernity--was contested and redefined in later spatial productions; its critical and imaginary terrain had to be seized, cleansed, and totally re-organized and re-invented. The Oriental space produced in Alastor symbolizes the beginning of that reclamation, the production of a new Orient that the poem 'discovers,' which would later be embellished, developed, augmented, and improved in succeeding visions and versions of the East" (123).

Mazzeo, Tilar J. "'Sporting Sketches during a Short Stay in Hindustane': Bodleian MS Shelley Adds. e.21 and Travel Literature in the Shelley/Byron Circle." Romanticism 4.2 (1998): 174-88.

Discusses Edward Ellerker Williams, a lieutenant in the British Army in India and later a member of the Shelley/Byron circle. His journal records events of March 1-12, 1814, including a visit to the ancient ruins, mosques, and harems of Delhi; Williams died on July 8, 1822, and Edward John Trelawny continued the notebook, which "provides significant information concerning the travel narrative as a Romantic genre" (174).

McGann, Jerome. "The Failures of Romanticism." In Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789-1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 270-87.

"Hemans is able to exploit Byron's notoriety, the scandal of his erotic life, to underscore the meaning of Merope as yet another figure of the fallen woman. More important, by placing her in a context where the central subject is poetic fame, 'the lost Pleiad' becomes a sign of the poet--including the male poet--as woman" (279). Brief discussions of sections from Manfred, Childe Harold (III, st. 88; IV, sts. 151, 80), and Beppo (st. 14), which are contrasted with Felicia Hemans' "The Lost Pleiad," "whose memory fixates on loss and whose ironies do not flaunt or celebrate themselves" (Rajan 279; 277). McGann also discusses Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon (1796). "The Lost Pleiad" is a sympathetic reading of Byron, "one that points to what she takes to be [his] true genius and lost soul" (280). McGann argues that Byron's reading of women as emblems of perfection and a "byword of faithlessness" "has its immediate source . . . in eighteenth-century elegy" (274) by writers such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, whose Sappho and Phaon (1796) defines a tradition of the elegy that departs from tradition. Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784) argues that "poets serve a savage God" (275), and Byron followed Smith's sentimental tradition in Elegiac Sonnets (1784), rather than Wordsworth's romantic one (276), but made Smith's sentimental sufferings "meteoric" in such works as Manfred and Childe Harold III.

Meritt, Mark D. "Natural History, Manfred, and the Critique of Knowledge." ERR 9.3 (Summer 1998): 351-62.

Merritt reads Byron's Manfred alongside an 1817 article on natural historical societies in Blackwood's Magazine to show their "common concern with the perception, interpretation, and naming of natural data by the individual subject" (351).

Michael, Jean Catherine Vincent. "Shrines and Sacred Architecture in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." Ph.D. diss., City U of New York, 1997, DAI, 58:9 (1998): 3539.

Mielsch, Hans-Ulrich. Sommer 1816: Lord Byron und die Shelleys am Genfer See. Zurich: NZZ, 1998.

Minta, Stephen. On a Voiceless Shore: Byron in Greece. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998.

Biographical treatment of Byron and Hobhouse's several literal and imaginative encounters with Greece, filtered through the lens of one English writer's late-twentieth-century visit.

Moyle, Jo. "'A New Byronism'? T.S. Eliot's 'Bored but Courteous' Poetry." BJ 26 (1998): 74-81.

Nichols, Ashton. The Revolutionary "I": Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

Six chapters on William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Brief discussion of Wordsworth's recollection of the power of "false" poetry; comparisons between Wordsworth's verse, Byron's Childe Harold III, and Shelley's Laon and Cythna (146-47).

Nicholson, Andrew. "Lord Byron." In Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael O'Neill (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998), 90-117.

Cogent summaries of major studies of Byron's poetry, including books by Jerome McGann, Jerome Christensen, Caroline Franklin, Andrew Elfenbein, Peter Graham, and others.

Nicholson, Andrew. "'That Suit in Chancery': Two New Byron Letters." BJ 26 (1998): 74-81.

O'Neill, Michael, ed. Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998.

"A critical guide to the best and the typical in scholarship and criticism devoted to literature of the Romantic period." This work aims at an undergraduate reader but discusses internecine warfare among Romantic scholars in unattractive detail, especially in O'Neill's introduction. Important gaps are evident in this bibliography, such as historically-informed studies that do not touch upon primary works. The reliability of introductory chapters varies. This volume will not replace Jordan's more descriptive and less evaluative MLA bibliography (1988).

Chapters on "General Studies of the Romantic Period," by Michael O'Neill; "William Blake," by David Fuller; "William Wordsworth," by Nicholas Roe; "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," by Nicola Trott; "Lord Byron," by Andrew Nicholson; "Percy Bysshe Shelley," by Jerrold E. Hogle; and "John Keats," by Greg Kucich. Bibliographies on John Clare; women poets; Burns; Cowper; Crabbe; Southey; Walter Scott; Jane Austen; Thomas Love Peacock; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; fictional writers, including Burney, Inchbald, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Hunt; as well as political prose writers.

Oueijan, Naji B. A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron's Oriental Tales. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

Peach, Annette. "Controlling an Image: Two Venetian Miniatures of Byron." BJ 26 (1998): 13-28.

Pfau, Thomas, and Robert F. Gleckner, eds. Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998.

Essays from the 1994 conference on "The Political and Aesthetic Education of Romanticism" at Duke University, which was organized by the editors. An introduction by Thomas Pfau on historicism, irony, and the lessons of Romanticism, with sections entitled "Varieties of Bildung in European Romanticism and Beyond," "Images and Institutions of Cultural Literacy in Romanticism," and "Gender, Sexuality, and the (Un)Romantic Canon." Essays relevant for this bibliography include those by David S. Ferris, "Keats and the Aesthetics of Critical Knowledge; or, The Ideology of Studying Romanticism at the Present Time" (103-25), mainly a reflection on McGann's essay on Keats; Joel Faflak's "Romantic Psychoanalysis: Keats, Identity, and (The Fall of) Hyperion" (304-27); Steven Bruhm's "Reforming Byron's Narcissism" (429-47); and Greg Kucich's "'This Horrid Theatre of Human Sufferings': Gendering the Stages of History in Catharine Macaulay and Percy Bysshe Shelley" (448-66).

Phillipson, Mark Loren. "Byronic Exile (Lord Byron)." Ph.D. diss., U of California, Berkeley, 1998, DAI, 59-08A (1998): 3004, 203 pages.

Childe Harold presents a "proto-exilic sensibility: the fundamental alternation of inspiration and disenchantment fueled by steady passage across borders." Phillipson focuses on this sensibility in order to discuss the poem's "exploitation of the anachronistic tradition of 18th century Spenserianism." Mazeppa (1819) is addressed as a "parable of exile"; his repudiation of the Byronic hero "invites a paradoxical haunting of that figure in later work." Displacement also shapes Don Juan, where language is disrupted by the location of the author in Italy at the time of its composition.

Poole, Gabriele. "Byron's Heroes and the Byronic Hero (Lord Byron, Characterization, Narrative)." Ph.D. diss., U of Notre Dame, 1998, DAI, 59-06A (1998): 2039.

This dissertation discusses the Byronic hero as a Weberian ideal-type. Byron "increasingly sought to articulate his reservations towards his own creation by modifying the traits of his heroes and/or by adopting various dialogic devices, which serve to detach the perspective of the hero from that of the work as a whole." This dissertation explores the relationship between the hero and heroines, antagonists, minor characters, the narrator or narrators, the plot, the imagery, and the story at large. Poole explores "discursive tensions" in Byron's The Giaour, "Bride of Abydos," The Corsair, and "Lara"; two later works, Mazeppa and Sardanapalus, are also discussed.

Porter, Andrew. "The Aspern Papers." Opera Rev. TLS 4968 (June 19, 1998): 21.

"Dominick Argento's opera of The Aspern Papers intercuts his own invented 1835 plot with the scenes of Henry James's story. Some of it is lush, and some very spare. In all, it is a score for today, re-creating for post-Schoenberg ears the romance of Bellini and Pasta, Shelley and Byron, a score that would be well understood by James and that is generously evoked by Argento."

Prochazka, Martin. "'But He Was Phrenzied': Rousseau's Figures and Text in the Third Canto of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." In British Romantics as Readers: Intertextualities, Maps of Misreading, Reinterpretations; Festschrift fur Horst Meller, ed. Michael Gassenmeier, Petre Bridzun, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Eric Pointner (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 171-82.

This essay questions whether references to Rousseau and Napoleon in the third canto of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage can be read as "figurae": "can we understand references to Napoleon and Rousseau as stages in what McGann calls [Byron's] 'special variation upon the traditional poetic use of the pilgrimage as a process of renewal'" (300)? The author argues that "inherent problems of McGann's approach become manifest when these mentions of historical characters and related literary fictions or rhetorical figures are treated as signs with a single, central referent-Byron's self" (171). McGann's sense of a "unified authorial self" cannot be maintained by the evidence of the poem (174). Harold becomes a "fit metaphor of the fictitious nature and evanescence of the author's self in the text" (176).

Robinson, Roger. "The Origins and Composition of James Beattie's Minstrel." Romanticism 4.2 (1998): 224-41.

Robinson explores how Beattie came to write a work that was so influential on Cowper, Burns, Bowles, Rogers, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Clare, Keats, and Tennyson.

Rosen, Charles. Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Dedicated to Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, this volume reprints reviews that appeared in that journal. Articles of interest for this journal include "The Definitive Text: Honore de Balzac, George Gordon Byron, William Wordsworth" (3-30) and "Separating Life and Art: Romantic Documents, Romantic Punctuation; Gustave Flaubert, George Gordon Byron" (51-75). Some essays are not completely up to date. Rosen opens an essay by stating that "P" is "one of the rare allusions in Byron that has not been identified"; the identification is "Prince Regent" (Lady Melbourne's letter of November 6, 1812). Other chapters touch upon M. H. Abrams (who appears, unaccountably, as M. K. Abrams), Elisabeth` David, Caspar David Friedrich, Robert Schumann, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, Friedrich Hölderlin, German and English Baroque drama, Romantic aesthetics, and Symbolist theory of language. Includes a wide-ranging discussion or works by Heinrich Schenker, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, William Empson, and George Bernard Shaw.

Saglia, Diego. "Matrimonial Politics: Two References to Marie Louise of Austria in Byron's Poetry." BJ 26 (1998): 112-15.

Sha, Richard. The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998.

Sha's fifth chapter, "Resisting Monumentality: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Poetic Sketch," argues that Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches (1793) use the poetic sketch to challenge their own desire for monumentality (i.e. for the building of monuments to oneself and others). Sha draws on De Man's essay on Shelley's The Triumph of Life to discuss defacement in literature. Where women were prevented from displaying their intellectual gifts, male poets tried to make their works more self-reflexive, ironic, and canonical by showing their awareness of the limitations of seeking to canonize oneself. "Given Byron's penchant for revision (he was admittedly less obsessive about revision than Wordsworth) and reorganization as well as the complicated manuscript and textual histories of the poem, he at times found in the sketch a more appropriate and enabling metaphor for writing than the monument" (186). Discusses Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (179-93) as a series of sketches (179): "the analogy of writing to sketching . . . accounts for Byron's self-conscious visual presentation of this poem. This perspective also allows us to see how Byron envisaged the provisionality of the sketch as an important counter to monumentality" (180); brief discussion of Shelley's "Ozymandias" (167) juxtaposed with Wordsworth's "This Column Intended by Bonaparte for a Triumphal Edifice in Milan, Now Lying by the Wayside in the Simplon Pass" (1820) and Descriptive Sketches (1793).

Simpson, Michael. Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

This study treats Manfred, Sardanapalus, Prometheus Unbound, Marino Faliero, Hellas, and other plays by Byron and Shelley "as a species of political discourse" (205) and questions the extent to which they could create the taste by which they would be enjoyed. Simpson considers how Byron's and Shelley's dramas were received by the press, and draws on the work of Foucault, Sedgwick, and other theorists to consider the importance of historicism, homoeroticism, and the closet as metaphors for their efforts at political reform.

Stabler, Jane. "George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan." In A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 247-58.

Stabler, Jane. "Pisan Theatricals: Byron and Othello in 1822." BJ 26 (1998): 39-49.

Stauffer, Andrew M. "Byron's Monumental Epitaph for His Dog Boatswain." BJ 26 (1998): 82-90.

Stauffer, Andrew M. "Fits of Rage: Anger and Romantic Poetry (William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron)." Ph.D. diss., U of Virginia, 1998, DAI, 59-02A (1998): 0498, 232 pages.

"This dissertation attends to the generic transformations of anger between Augustan satire and Victorian dramatic monologue." It focuses on the "dialogue between anger and truth as Blake, Shelley, and Byron imagined it." Anger "encourages the transgression of forms and boundaries, and the poets who yield to it produce an art marked by generic experimentation, as they search for ways to incarnate the disembodied voice, and convey the alienated perspective, of anger." Explores Blake's use of apocalyptic spectacle, Shelley's use of the masque, and Byron's use of the curse. "Blake, Shelley, and Byron write themselves towards the poetic forms of the Victorians and Moderns by way of anger."

Taylor, Anya. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780-1830. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

This is the first study to "describe the bulk and variety of writings about drink; to set these poems, novels, essays, letters and journals in a historical, sociological and medical context; to demonstrate the importance of drunkenness in the works of a number of major and minor writers of the period; and to suggest that during these periods, for a short time, the pleasures and pains of drinking are held in a vivacious balance" (1). After discussing the historical realities of drinking, Taylor turns to the drunkenness of Robert Burns as seen by William Wordsworth; of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son, Hartley; of Keats; and of women Romantic poets and writers, including Hannah More, Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maria Edgeworth, who criticize male drinking more directly than their male counterparts. Extended discussion of Keats's poems in a chapter titled "'Joy's Grape': Keats, Comus, and Paradise Lost IX": includes readings of Endymion (166-72), Hyperion (165), "To Autumn" (168), "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (161, 169), "Ode to a Nightingale" (176-77; 183-87), "Lamia" (183; 187-88), and "Ode on Melancholy" (164-65), with accounts of Byron's interactions with Sheridan.

Vail, Jeffery. "Byron's 'Impromptu on a Recent Incident': A New Text of a Regency Squib." KSJ 47 (1998): 29-31.

Vail, Jeffery. "The Literary Relationships of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore." Ph.D. diss., U. of Delaware, 1998, DAI, 59-09A (1998): 3471.

This dissertation discusses the formal, ideological, political, intellectual, and psychological influences of Thomas Moore and Lord Byron upon each other. They were "the most significant that either poet shared with any of the living poets of his day." Byron's friendship with Moore "led him to firmly associate himself with the Whig party"; Byron's imitation of "Moore's satirical and political poetry led him to his own innovative satirical forms." Byron's Hebrew Melodies were modeled on Moore's Irish Melodies. After Byron's departure, Moore's "Lallah Rookh" was clearly influenced by Byron's "oriental" narrative poems; his "Loves of the Angels" was influenced by Byron's relationship with Augusta Leigh. Finally, Moore's "voluminous and psychologically acute biography" helped "guard his friend's legacy, and still shapes modern conceptions of Byron."

Vail, Jeffery. "'My Bright Twin Sisters of the Sky': Manfred, Moore's Loves of the Angels, and the Shadow of Augusta Leigh." BJ 26 (1998): 29-38.

Victory, Nancy Clark. "'To Play with Fixities and Definites': Byron's Fanciful Real World Games in 'Don Juan' (Lord Byron)." Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State U and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 1998, DAI, 59-08A (1998): 3005, 254 pages.

This dissertation explores Juan and Haidee's relationship in Don Juan; Victory views their relationship as "a startlingly Romantic expression of poetic activity," wherein they transform a hostile world into a "natural playworld" by using "a fourth variety of Romantic imagination": Byronic Fancy. Julia's idea of romantic love is trapped in a Petrarchan model; Gulbeyaz views love as a mere strategy of control, while English women value an inauthentic, intellectual "feeling" that they have gleaned from sentimental literature. "In their attempts to find personal value through the love games they devise, Juan's amours cannot get beyond the most basic level of creative play--that of the Coleridgean Fancy." While many of the characters in Don Juan respond mechanically to their surroundings, the reader finds himself enriched by interacting with a "playfully shifting text, narrator, and poet."

Wandling, Timothy John. "Byron, Agency, and Transgressive Eloquence: The Fate of Readers in Nineteenth-Century British Literature." Ph.D. diss., Stanford U, 1997, DAI, 58-9 (1998): 3543-44, 279 pages.

Weisman, Karen A. "Between Irony and Radicalism: The Other Way of a Romantic Education." In Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998), 76-88.

Weisman questions whether students of Romanticism are as naive as McGann and Levinson have claimed. Weisman explores Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776), De Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality" in Blindness and Insight (1983), Marjorie Levinson's Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (1989), Alan Grossman's poem "Of the Great House," and Charles Bernstein's "Verdi and Postmodernism" (a parody of Byron's "She Walks in Beauty Like the Night") to criticize the preoccupations of new historicists. "By the late twentieth century, the search for the novel has itself reached a saturation point, and so if history repeats itself and New Historicism interrogates the false consciousness of cultural repetition, we may well become not only blunted by reiteration but downright bored by it" (80).

Wohlpart, A. James. "A Tradition of Male Poetics: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an Allegory of Art." Midwest Quarterly 39.3 (Spring 1998): 265-79.

The writer argues that the critique of artistic creativity apparent in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein finds its locus in the male-dominated artistic arena of her time. The novel criticizes not only Byron and Shelley, but also "the tradition that led up to this period, suggesting that artistic creativity had predominantly become a male pursuit. He contends that at the heart of Shelley's critique is the way in which male creativity omits any feminine influence and thus creates a series of monsters. He concludes that Shelley does not suggest that a sudden acceptance of the feminine will alleviate the overwhelming male dominance of art, but shows how such a domination insidiously inscribes the female in such a way that responsibility for the monster's actions is unfairly forced on her as she becomes a semblance of the monster himself."

Wood, Gillen D'Arcy. "Mourning the Marbles: The Strange Case of Lord Elgin's Nose." WC 29.3 (Summer 1998), 171-77.

Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Anthology of Romantic authors. Includes selections from Blake, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Hazlitt, Hunt, and the Shelleys.