"The Flesh is Frail"


Book Description

Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron's known letters supersedes Prothero's incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero's edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.




Lord Byron


Book Description

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Byron's Travels


Book Description

A new hardcover selection of Lord Byron's letters, poems, and journals, tracing his dramatic, scandalous, heroic life and his wide-ranging travels—and timed to the two-hundredth anniversary of his tragic early death George Gordon, Lord Byron, was one of the leading figures of British Romanticism. The Byronic hero he gave his name to—the charming, dashing, rebellious outsider—remains a powerful literary archetype. Byron was known for his unconventional character and his extravagant and flamboyant lifestyle: he had numerous scandalous love affairs, including with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his lovers, famously described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know." His letters and journals were originally published in two volumes; this new one-volume selection includes poems and provides a vivid overview of his dramatic life arranged to reflect his travels through Scotland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Albania, Switzerland, and of course Greece, where he died. It contains a new introduction by scholar Fiona Stafford highlighting Byron’s enduring significance and the ways in which he was ahead of his time. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Each title includes an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.




The Unpublished Letters of Thomas Moore Vol 1


Book Description

Thomas Moore was one of the most prominent authors of the early 19th century. This collection presents over 600 previously unpublished letters from numerous libraries, archives and other sources worldwide. Vail's extensively-annotated edition will make available a treasure trove of material which will prove invaluable to any Romantic scholar.




Summer in the Shadow of Byron


Book Description

In the spring of 1816, Lord Byron was the greatest poet of his generation and the most famous man in Britain, but his personal life was about to erupt. Fleeing his celebrity, notoriety and debts, he sought refuge in Europe, taking his young doctor with him. As an inexperienced medic with literary aspirations of his own, Dr Polidori could not believe his luck. That summer another literary star also arrived in Geneva. With Percy Bysshe Shelley came his lover, Mary and her step-sister Claire Clairmont. For the next three months, this party of young bohemians shared their lives, charged with sexual and artistic tensions. It was a period of extraordinary creativity from which would emerge Frankenstein, the gothic masterpiece of Romantic fiction, Byron's Childe Harold, Shelley's Mont Blanc, and The Vampyre by John Polidori, the first great vampire novel. It was also a time of remarkable drama and emotional turmoil. For Byron and the Shelleys, their stay by the lake would serve to immortalise them in the annals of literary history. But for Claire and Polidori, the Swiss sojourn would scar them forever.




The Trial of Queen Caroline


Book Description

Traces the early nineteenth-century adultery trial of Queen Caroline, describing her loveless arranged marriage to George IV, their mutual separation and affairs with other people, and the public's riotous defense of Caroline.




Byron's Don Juan


Book Description

In this first full-length study of Byron's masterpiece in over thirty years, Richard Cronin boldly presents Don Juan as the epic poem of its age. Impressively illuminating the whole literary nineteenth century through a single work, he asks what kind of epic can be said to represent an era more readily defined by newspapers and magazines than by competitors such as Wordsworth's Excursion or Southey's Joan of Arc arose. Delving into questions of form and choice of hero, he also explores the controversies that informed the poem's reception, its contemporary interactions, and its influence on later nineteenth-century literature. Don Juan, he argues, is the epic poem demanded by an age of cant and dissembling, when people's feelings and the world they lived in had become disconnected. In it, he finds a powerful defence of liberal thinking at a time when that kind of thinking was under threat.




Byron, Poetics and History


Book Description

Jane Stabler offers the first full-scale examination of Byron's poetic form in relation to historical debates of his time. Responding to recent studies of publishing and audiences in the Romantic period, Stabler argues that Byron's poetics developed in response to contemporary cultural history and his reception by the English reading public. Drawing on extensive new archive research into Byron's correspondence and reading, Stabler traces the complexity of the intertextual dialogues that run through his work. For example, Stabler analyses Don Juan alongside Galignani's Messenger - Byron's principal source of news about British politics while in Italy - and refers to hitherto unpublished letters between Byron's publishers and his friends to reveal a powerful impulse among his contemporaries to direct his controversial poetic style to their own conflicting political ends. This fascinating study will be of interest to Byronists and, more broadly, to scholars of Romanticism in general.




The Age of Discretion


Book Description

When the sex in Vivien Quarry’s thirty-two-year marriage dwindles to nothing, her husband Geoff finally gives her a reason: ‘Men are hardwired to not find older women attractive’. This unforgivable statement, uttered by a man long past his Adonis years, prompts Vivien to take drastic action. At sixty-seven, she most definitely doesn’t feel ‘past it’, and so enlists the services of the enigmatic Martin Glover from The Discretion Agency. Under the sardonic eye of her oldest friend Jules, a world-famous operatic soprano facing the closing years of a brilliant career, Viv embarks on a series of wildly unpredictable, and sometimes hilariously cringeworthy dates – with wholly unexpected consequences. Told with great humour and heart, the accomplished Virginia Duigan delivers a provocative and profoundly relatable story that proves living is not reserved for the young. Praise for Virginia’s past novels ‘Highly recommended.’ ABC’s The Book Show ‘Captivating’ The Australian ‘Duigan is a wonderful writer’ The Sunday Telegraph




Byron and Place


Book Description

This new study of Byron explores the 'geo-historical' - places where historically significant events have occurred. Cheeke examines the ways in which the notion of being there becomes the central claim and shaping force in Byron's poetry up to 1818. He goes on to explore the concept of being in-between which characterises Byron's 1818-21 poetry. Finally, Byron's complex nostalgia for England, his sense of having been there , is read in relation to a broader critique of memory, home-sickness and place-attachment.