Book Description

This volume is the first to draw together, in eight original essays by international scholars, some of the dominant strains in critical thinking about Byron’s temperament and behaviour. Using discourses and paradigms drawn from a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, history of medicine, behaviourism and cultural studies, its contributors explore and synthesise the development of “behavioural strategies” and their impact on his poetic manner. Studies of the precise relationship of the poet’s body and mind have often placed Byron within some of our modern psychological and medical frameworks without acknowledging that these “diagnoses” are bound up with the complex business of reading and responding to literature. The topic of ‘temperament’ uniquely allows concurrent discussion of body and mind within the context of Byron’s writing, as well as his life. In this sense, the book is primarily literary. Recent scientific or quasi-scientific theory is utilised and not discounted, but the book insists upon the relevance of literary procedures and evidence, broadly understood, which are not dependent upon it and can contribute to, enlarge, or cast doubts upon some of its claims.