A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY154 start with B start with B
Rilke penned The Book of Hours between 1899 and 1903 in three parts. Readers and experts alike consider the collection among Rilke's most important and enduring works.
In The Book of Margins, his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabès is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabès considers the work of several of his contemporaries, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Lévinas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his translator, Rosmarie Waldrop. This book will be important reading for students of Jewish literature, French literature, and literature of the modern and postmodern ages.
Born in Cairo in 1912, Edmond Jabès lived in France from 1956 until his death in 1991. His extensively translated and widely honored works include The Book of Questions and The Book of Shares. Both of these were translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop, who is also a poet.
Religion and Postmodernism series
From the classical encyclopedias of Pliny to famous tales such as The Travels of Marco Polo, historical travel writing has had a lasting impact, despite the fact that it was based on a curious mixture of truth, legend, and outright superstition. One foundational medieval source that expands on the ancient idea of the “wonders of the world” is the fifteenth-century French Book of the Marvels of the World, an illustrated guide to the globe filled with oddities, curiosities, and wonders—tales of fantasy and reality intended for the medieval armchair traveler. The fifty-six locales featured in the manuscript are presented in a manner that suggests authority and objectivity but are rife with stereotypes and mischaracterizations, meant to simultaneously instill a sense of wonder and fear in readers.
In The Book of Marvels, the authors explore the tradition of encyclopedias and travel writing, examining the various sources for geographic knowledge in the Middle Ages. They look closely at the manuscript copies of the French text and its complex images, delving into their origins, style, content, and meaning. Ultimately, this volume seeks to unpack how medieval white Christian Europeans saw their world and how the fear of difference—so pervasive in society today—is part of a long tradition stretching back millennia.
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 11 to September 1, 2024, and at the Morgan Library & Museum from January 24 to May 25, 2025.
Balance sheet of a life ratified by death.
Whatever exists has no existence unless shared.
Possessions under seal are lost possessions.
At first sight, giving, offering yourself in order to receive an equivalent gift in return, would seem to be ideal sharing.
But can All be divided?
Can a feeling, a book, a life be shared entirely?
On the other hand, if we cannot share all, what remains and will always remain outside sharing? What has never, at the heart of our possessions, been ours?
And what if we can share the vital desire to share, our only means of escape from solitude, from nothingness?
An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period.
Medieval Studies/Literary Theory
An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period. In the first book to examine one of the most peculiar features of one of the greatest and most perplexing poems of England’s late Middle Ages-the successive attempts of Piers Plowman to begin, and to keep beginning-D. Vance Smith compels us to rethink beginning, as concept and practice, in both medieval and contemporary terms.The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how Langland’s poem exemplifies a widespread interest in beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an interest that appears in such divergent fields as the physics of motion, the measurement of time, logic, grammar, rhetoric, theology, book production, and insurrection. Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said and the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he conceives a work’s beginning as a figure of the beginning of the work itself, the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continue to return.ISBN 0-8166-3760-1 Cloth/jacket £24.50 $34.95x296 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 MayMedieval Cultures Series, volume 28Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1431) has long been recognized as France’s first professional woman of letters, and interest in her voluminous and wide-ranging corpus has been steadily rising for decades. During the tumultuous later years of the Hundred Years’ War, Christine’s lone but strong feminine voice could be heard defending women, expounding the highest ideals for good governance, and lamenting France’s troubled times alongside her own personal trials. In The Mutability of Fortune, Christine fuses world history with autobiography to demonstrate mankind’s subjugation to the ceaselessly changing, and often cruel, whims of Fortune. Now, for the first time, this poem is accessible to an English-speaking audience, further expanding our appreciation of this ground-breaking woman author and her extraordinary body of work.
An immediate sensation upon its 1993 publication in Europe, already translated into more than a dozen languages, Border State is a brilliantly realized account of a man in the grip of Western excess, emotionally crippled by a world that is subsuming his own and inhabiting a West in which "all countries have become imaginary deserts of ruins where crowds of nomads roam from one attraction to the other." His tale, in which disillusion and murder become inextricably linked, is a compelling exploration of scarcity, longing, and madness.
In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.
In four chapters, spanning centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception, Botticelli Past and Present engages with the significant debates about Botticelli. Each chapter collects several essays and includes a short introduction that positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The chapters are organized chronologically, beginning with discussion of the artist and his work in his own time, moving on to the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and longest-lasting empires in history—and one of the most culinarily inclined. In this powerful and complex concoction of politics, culture, and cuisine, the production and consumption of food reflected the lives of the empire’s citizens from sultans to soldiers. Food bound people of different classes and backgrounds together, defining identity and serving symbolic functions in the social, religious, political, and military spheres. In Bountiful Empire, Priscilla Mary Işın examines the changing meanings of the Ottoman Empire’s foodways as they evolved over more than five centuries.
Işın begins with the essential ingredients of this fascinating history, examining the earlier culinary traditions in which Ottoman cuisine was rooted, such as those of the Central Asian Turks, Abbasids, Seljuks, and Byzantines. She goes on to explore the diverse aspects of this rich culinary culture, including etiquette, cooks, restaurants, military food, food laws, and food trade. The book draws on everything from archival documents to poetry and features more than one hundred delectable illustrations.
Williams weaves a tight net of historical circumstances, iconographic traditions, exegetical implications, political motivations, and liturgical functions to explain the imagery in the windows of the trades. Her account of changing social relationships in thirteenth-century Chartres focuses on the bakers, tavern keepers, and money changers whose bread, wine, and money were used as means of exchange, tithing, and offering throughout medieval society. Drawing on a wide variety of original documents and scholarly work, this book makes important new contributions to our knowledge of one of the great monuments of Western culture.
Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vendler suggests. To cast off an earlier style is to do an act of violence to the self. Why might a poet do this, adopting a sharply different form? In this exploration of three kinds of break in poetic style, Vendler clarifies the essential connection between style and substance in poetry. Opening fresh perspectives on the work of three very different poets, her masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet’s work.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ invention of sprung rhythm marks a dramatic break with his early style. Rhythm, Vendler shows us, is at the heart of Hopkins’ aesthetic, and sprung rhythm is his symbol for danger, difference, and the shock of the beautiful. In Seamus Heaney’s work, she identifies clear shifts in grammatical “atmosphere” from one poem to the next—from “nounness” to the “betweenness” of an adverbial style—shifts whose moral and political implications come under scrutiny here. And finally Vendler looks at Jorie Graham’s departure from short lines to numbered lines to squared long lines of sentences, marking a move from deliberation to cinematic “freeze-framing to coverage, each with its own meaning in this poet’s career.
Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels—including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic. A fine study of three poets and a superb exposition of the craft of poetry, The Breaking of Style revives our lapsed sense of what style means.
Examining official and off-the-record meetings with both senior politicians and ordinary voters, Gibbon addresses tough questions that are troubling the entire European continent: Now that the United Kingdom has voted for Brexit, to what extent can it truly “leave” a set of relationships that extend to the country’s doorstep? And will the decision be a lethal blow to the European Union, perhaps spurring on copycat secession movements?
Stanislaw Baranczak, a Polish writer in exile, turns to his colleagues and their plights, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, to explain why oppressive regimes could not succeed in their attempts to transform the Eastern European into Homo sovieticus.
These superb essays focus on the role that culture, and particularly literature, has played in keeping the spirit of intellectual independence alive in Eastern and Central Europe. Exploring a variety of issues from censorship to underground poetry, Baranczak shows why, in societies where people struggle to survive under totalitarian rule, art is believed to have the power to make things happen.
He brings into sharp relief the works and personalities of many legendary figures of recent Eastern European political and cultural history from Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II to Václav Havel and Adam Michnik to Czeslaw Milosz, Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Joseph Brodsky--and makes vivid the context from which they spring. Some of the essays probe the sense of inarticulateness experienced by writers in exile; many represent the literary essay at its best; all reveal that Baranczak is a sophisticated, often savagely funny writer on whom nothing is lost.
This refreshing and provocative book guides us toward a clearer understanding of what has led to the present moment, in which the nations of Eastern and Central Europe, tired of striving to "breathe under water," are finally "coming up for air." It is rewarding reading for anyone interested in art's confrontation with an intractable political reality--wherever it occurs in the world.
In this short but powerful book, Stephen Green argues that it is time to acknowledge that underlying all the sound and fury of the Brexit debate were fundamental questions—whether or not fully recognized—about British identity. Are the British different, special, and capable of finding their own way in the world? Who are they, those who call themselves British? Is it all too easy to blame Brexit on post-industrial decline in the traditional heartlands of the Labor Party, or scaremongering by a band of deluded “Little Englanders”? Or is British identity more complex, deep-rooted—and perhaps, in some sense, troubling—than those of other European nations?
Legislative member organizations (LMOs)—such as caucuses in the U.S. Congress and intergroups in the European Parliament—exist in lawmaking bodies around the world. Unlike parties and committees, LMOs play no obvious, predefined role in the legislative process. They provide legislators with opportunities to establish social networks with colleagues who share common interests. In turn, such networks offer valuable opportunities for the efficient exchange of policy-relevant—and sometimes otherwise unattainable—information between legislative offices. Building on classic insights from the study of social networks, the authors provide a comparative overview of LMOs across advanced, liberal democracies. In two nuanced case studies of LMOs in the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress, the authors rely on a mix of social network analysis, sophisticated statistical methods, and careful qualitative analysis of a large number of in-depth interviews.
Enlightenment-era writers had not yet come to take technology for granted, but nonetheless were—as we are today—both attracted to and repelled by its potential. This volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence, examining technology’s influence on Enlightenment British literature, as well as the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology. Offering a counterbalance to the abundance of studies on literature and science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, this volume’s focus encompasses approaches to literary history that help us understand technologies like the steam engine and the telegraph along with representations of technology in literature such as the “political machine.” Contributors ultimately show how literature across genres provided important sites for Enlightenment readers to recognize themselves as “chimeras”—“hybrids of machine and organism”—and to explore the modern self as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”
In eighteenth-century Britain, criminals were routinely whipped, branded, hanged, or transported to America. Only in the last quarter of the century—with the War of American Independence and legal and sociopolitical challenges to capital punishment—did the criminal justice system change, resulting in the reformed prison, or penitentiary, meant to educate, rehabilitate, and spiritualize even hardened felons. This volume is the first to explore the relationship between historical penal reform and Romantic-era literary texts by luminaries such as Godwin, Keats, Byron, and Austen. The works examined here treat incarceration as ambiguous: prison walls oppress and reinforce the arbitrary power of legal structures but can also heighten meditation, intensify the imagination, and awaken the conscience. Jonas Cope skillfully traces the important ideological work these texts attempt: to reconcile a culture devoted to freedom with the birth of the modern prison system that presents punishment as a form of rehabilitation.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
British women in the second half of the 20th century have produced a body of work that is as diverse as it is entertaining. This book offers an informal, jargon-free introduction to the fiction of sixteen contemporary writers either brought up or now living in England, from Muriel Spark to Jeanette Winterson.
British Women Writing Fiction presents a balanced view comprising women writing since the 1950s and 1960s, those who attracted critical attention during the 1970s and 1980s, and those who have burst upon the literary scene more recently, including African-Caribbean and African women. The essays show how all of these writers treat British subjects and themes, sometimes from radically different perspectives, and how those who are daughters of immigrants see themselves as women writing on the margins of society.
Abby Werlock's introduction explores the historical and aesthetic factors that have contributed to the genre, showing how even those writers who began in a traditional vein have created experimental work. The contributors provide complete bibliographies of each writer's works and selected bibliographies of criticism. Exceptional both in its breadth of subjects covered and critical approaches taken, this book provides essential background that will enable readers to appreciate the singular merits of each writer. It offers an approach toward better understanding favorite authors and provides a way to become acquainted with new ones.
Scholars have long characterized the fairy tale as a form with tremendous power to influence cultures and individuals. The late twentieth century saw important critical work revealing the sinister aspects of that power, particularly its negative effects on female readers. But such an approach can inadvertently reduce the history of the fairy tale to a linear development from the “traditional” tale (pure, straight, patriarchal, and didactic) to the “postmodern” tale (playful, sophisticated, feminist, and radical). Campbell joins other contemporary scholars in arguing that the fairy tale has always been a remarkably elastic form, allowing writers and storytellers of all types to reshape it according to their purposes.
The Brontës are most famous today for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, haunting novels that clearly repurpose fairy tales and folklore. Campbell’s book, however, reveals similar repurposing throughout the entire Brontë oeuvre. The Brontës and the Fairy Tale is recursive: in demonstrating the ubiquity and multiplicity of uses of fairy tales in the works of the Brontës, Campbell enhances not only our understanding of the Brontës’ works but also the status of fairy tales in the Victorian period.
Oliver Goldsmith arrived in England in 1756 a penniless Irishman. He toiled for years in the anonymity of Grub Street—already a synonym for impoverished hack writers—before he became one of literary London’s most celebrated authors. Norma Clarke tells the extraordinary story of this destitute scribbler turned gentleman of letters as it unfolds in the early days of commercial publishing, when writers’ livelihoods came to depend on the reading public, not aristocratic patrons. Clarke examines a network of writers radiating outward from Goldsmith: the famous and celebrated authors of Dr. Johnson’s “Club” and those far less fortunate “brothers of the quill” trapped in Grub Street.
Clarke emphasizes Goldsmith’s sense of himself as an Irishman, showing that many of his early literary acquaintances were Irish émigrés: Samuel Derrick, John Pilkington, Paul Hiffernan, and Edward Purdon. These writers tutored Goldsmith in the ways of Grub Street, and their influence on his development has not previously been explored. Also Irish was the patron he acquired after 1764, Robert Nugent, Lord Clare. Clarke places Goldsmith in the tradition of Anglo-Irish satirists beginning with Jonathan Swift. He transmuted troubling truths about the British Empire into forms of fable and nostalgia whose undertow of Irish indignation remains perceptible, if just barely, beneath an equanimous English surface.
To read Brothers of the Quill is to be taken by the hand into the darker corners of eighteenth-century Grub Street, and to laugh and cry at the absurdities of the writing life.
Browning's Beginnings was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Browning's Beginnings offers a fresh approach to the poet who, among major Victorians, has proved at once the most congenial and most inscrutable to modern readers. Drawing on recent developments in literary theory and in the criticism of romantic poetry, Herbert
F. Tucker, Jr., argues that Browning's stylistic "obscurity" is the result of a principled poetics of evasion. This art of disclosure, in deferring formal and semantic finalities, constitutes an aesthetic counterpart to his open-ended moral philosophy of"incompleteness," Browning's poems, like his enormously productive career, find their motivation and sustenance in his optimistic love of the future—a love that is indistinguishable from his lifelong fear that there will be nothing left to say.The opening chapters trace the workings of Browning's art of disclosure with extensive and original interpretations of the unduly neglected early poems, Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello, and place special emphasis on Browning's attitudes toward poetic tradition and language. A chapter on Browning's attitudes toward poetic tradition and language. A chapter on Browning's plays identifies dynamics of representation in Pippa Passes, Strafford,and King Victor and King Charles. Tucker discusses the pervasive analogy between Browning's ideas about poetic representation and about representation in its erotic and religious aspects, and shows how the early poems and plays illustrate correlative developments in poetics and in the exploration and dramatic rendering of human psychology. The remaining chapters follow the poetic psychology of Browning to its culmination in the great poems of his middle years; exemplary readings of selected dramatic lyrics and monologues suggest that the ways of meaning in Browning's mature work variously bear out the sense of endlessness or perpetual initiation that is central to his poetic beginnings.
Tucker thus contends that the "romantic" and the "Victorian" Browning have more in common than is generally supposed, and his book should appeal to students of both periods. Its discussion of general literary issues - poetic influence, closure, representation, and meaning - in application to particular texts should further recommend Browning's Beginnings to the nonspecialist reader interested in poetry and poetic theory.
This will stand as the definitive account of Robert Browning's development to maturity as a man and poet. Drawing on all available material, including important new manuscript findings, John Maynard reconstructs the circumstances of Browning's youth—his ancestry, his attractive and eccentric family, life in the new suburban London, his early understanding of himself and the world around him, his rich cultural education at home and with his teachers and friends and gives us a warm and convincing picture of Browning's boyhood and growth. Maynard traces Browning's early efforts to define his role as a poet, providing a full critical interpretation of his relation to the Romantics, especially the peculiarly powerful influence Shelley exerted on his early work.
The development of Browning's mind is examined in his response to his early schooling and private tutoring at home, his year at the new London University, and his decision to drop out of the university and all conventional career plans. The history concludes with a survey of Browning's reading in the period of self-education that initiated his mature work as a major poet of our modern era. Maynard's intention throughout is not to provide a day-to-day account of a boy and young man's life, but to flesh out the larger epic of a gifted child's formation in his environment, and the emergence of his own direction out of the context of his family, society, and literary culture. In so doing he has achieved a model case study of the development of a young man's mind and of a young poet's sense of identity as a creative artist. And he has recaptured the social, physical, and cultural ambiance of middle-class London in the early nineteenth century. It is a story told with grace and critical good sense.
Five studies by leading art scholars focus on key works in the collection and contribute to a new understanding of the origins of many of the pieces. Two introductory essays comment on the character of the collection as a whole, its acquisition by Duke University, and its conservation. Finally, the catalog section discusses the more important pieces in the collection and is followed by a checklist of entries and smaller photographs of all other objects.
Contributors. Ilene H. Forsyth, Jean M. French, Dorothy F. Glass, Dieter Kimpel, Jill Meredith, Linda S. Roundhill
French symbolist artist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) seemed to thrive at the intersection of literature and art. Known as “the painter-writer,” he drew on the works of Poe, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mallarmé for his subject matter. And yet he concluded that visual art has nothing to do with literature. Examining this apparent contradiction, The Brush and the Pen transforms the way we understand Redon’s career and brings to life the interaction between writers and artists in fin-de-siècle Paris.
Through the prism of the lives of Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron, Judt examines pivotal issues in the history of contemporary French society—antisemitism and the dilemma of Jewish identity, political and moral idealism in public life, the Marxist moment in French thought, the traumas of decolonization, the disaffection of the intelligentsia, and the insidious quarrels rending Right and Left. Judt focuses particularly on Blum's leadership of the Popular Front and his stern defiance of the Vichy governments, on Camus's part in the Resistance and Algerian War, and on Aron's cultural commentary and opposition to the facile acceptance by many French intellectuals of communism's utopian promise. Severely maligned by powerful critics and rivals, each of these exemplary figures stood fast in their principles and eventually won some measure of personal and public redemption.
Judt constructs a compelling portrait of modern French intellectual life and politics. He challenges the conventional account of the role of intellectuals precisely because they mattered in France, because they could shape public opinion and influence policy. In Blum, Camus, and Aron, Judt finds three very different men who did not simply play the role, but evinced a courage and a responsibility in public life that far outshone their contemporaries.
"An eloquent and instructive study of intellectual courage in the face of what the author persuasively describes as intellectual irresponsibility."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times
Lane discredits the conservative notion that Victorian literature expresses only a demand for repression and moral restraint. But he also refutes historicist and Foucauldian approaches, arguing that they dismiss the very idea of repression and end up denouncing psychoanalysis as complicit in various kinds of oppression. These approaches, Lane argues, reduce Victorian literature to a drama about politics, power, and the ego. Striving instead to reinvigorate discussions of fantasy and the unconscious, Lane offers a clear, often startling account of writers who grapple with the genuine complexities of love, desire, and friendship.
Butterfly, the Bride looks at law from the outside, using narrative to provide a fresh perspective on the issues of law and social structure---and individual responses to law. This book thoroughly explores relationships between inner and public lives by examining what is ordinarily classified as the sphere of private life---the world of family relationships.
George Gordon 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.
The final volume of this splendid edition contains a comprehensive index to the contents of the preceding volumes—the several thousand letters, the journals, the notes and biographical sketches. The index is prefaced by a generous selection of Byron’s aphorisms, bons mots, and memorable statements, culled by Leslie Marchand from the letters and journals and arranged under subject headings.
George Gordon 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.
An enchanting epistolary saga ends with the publication of this volume. Volume XI: ‘For freedom’s battle’ contains the letters Byron wrote from Greece between August 1823 and April 9, 1824, ten days before his death. Also included are over fifty letters dating from 1807 to 1820 that have come to light since Leslie A. Marchand began this project ten years ago.
In the letters from Greece a new set of correspondents appears, and a new tone is apparent. Although occasionally playful, Byron is preoccupied with the revolution and his efforts to unite the Greeks in a common cause despite their discord. His chief correspondents are his business agents in the islands and his banker friend in Genoa, Charles Barry, to whom he writes frank accounts of daily affairs. His letters to Hobhouse and to John Bowring attempt to give a realistic picture of the Greek struggle. To Teresa Guiccioli he writes only short, dutiful postscripts in English to the longer letters addressed to her brother.
Among the additional letters that became available too late to take their chronological place in the earlier volumes are those discovered in 1976, locked in a trunk at Barclays Bank; all but one of these fourteen letters were written to Scrope Davies, Byron’s witty friend and drinking companion.
George Gordon 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.
Byron’s brilliant epistolary saga approaches its end in this last full volume of his letters, from early October 1822 to his fateful departure for Greece in July 1823. During these months he was living in Genoa, with Teresa and her father and brother occupying an apartment in his house. Mary Shelley was staying with the Hunts in a house some distance away.
Byron enlarged his circle of English acquaintances, but his liveliest correspondence was still with John Murray, Kinnaird, Hobhouse, and Moore. Of special interest are his frank letters, half flirtatious, to Lady Hardy, those to Trelawny and Mary Shelley, and a growing number to Leigh Hunt and his brother John (publisher of The Liberal and of Byron’s poems after his break with Murray), discussing inter alia his thoughts about the continuation of Don Juan.
There is irony in Byron’s advice for a reconciliation between Webster and his wife Frances, whose matrimonial virtue Byron was proud to have spared in England. And there is pathos in his letters to his half-sister urging her and her children to join him in Italy, unaware that his missives to Augusta and her replies were scrutinized by Lady Byron. From April on, the letters are full of concern for support of the Greek forces and preparations for his departure.
George Gordon 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.
The ninth volume in Leslie Marchand’s highly acclaimed, unexpurgated edition of Byron’s letters finds the poet in Pisa with Teresa Guiccioli. His unique journal, “Detached Thoughts,” is finished shortly after his arrival in November 1821, and he is drawn into Shelley’s circle (including Edward Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe, and later Trelawny). His letters to Mary Shelley, the Hunts, and Trelawny after the death of Shelley are especially moving. Another tragedy, the death of his daughter Allegra, leaves him deeply affected, and he refers to it time and time again.
Money problems continue to plague him, as do suspicions surrounding his political activities. Following a fracas with a half-drunken dragoon and the imprisonment of two of his servants because of it, Byron is forced to leave Pisa and install himself and Teresa in a villa near Leghorn. His correspondence with his publisher reveals increasing displeasure with Murray’s delays, indecision, and anxiety over Don Juan, and Byron finally breaks off the relationship. But his output of verse is in no way lessened, and by the end of this volume in 1822, he has finished six more cantos for Don Juan as well as other poems.
George Gordon 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.
Born for Opposition opens with Byron in Ravenna, in 1821. His passion for the Countess Guiccioli is subsiding into playful fondness, and he confesses to his sister Augusta that he is not “so furiously in love as at first.” Italy, meanwhile, is afire with the revolutionary activities of the Carbonari, which Byron sees as “the very poetry of politics.” His journal, written while the insurrection grew, is a remarkable record of his reading and reflections while awaiting the sounds of gunfire. In spite of the turmoil, Byron stuck fast to his work. By the end of this volume, in October 1821, he is established in Pisa, having written Sardanapalus, Cain, and The Vision of Judgement.
George Gordon 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.
In the fifth installment of this marvelous serial story, we read about Byron’s separation from his wife. Besides his pleading letters to Annabella asking her to reconsider, there are level-headed letters to Murray and Hobhouse and Hunt and Rogers—all written during the tempestuous time before his final departure from England. The accounts written during the ensuing summer, of Waterloo and the Rhine and Switzerland, reveal new depths of Byron’s maturing mind. But the very best letters here are the ones from Italy: freed from the inhibitions of English society, Byron’s spirit seems to expand and his letters reflect the joie de vivre that, despite his melancholy, was an inherent part of his character.
George Gordon 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.
In this volume, Byron corresponds with writers such as Thomas Moore, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and “Monk” Lewis; with John Murray about the publication of The Corsair, Lara, and The Hebrew Melodies; and with many personal friends. A new interest is his association with the Drury Lane Theater. The crucial events of his private life at this time are his engagement to Anabella Milbanke and their marriage early in 1815—a marriage that was to last little more than a year. Especially revelatory are his letters to his fiancée and those to his long-time confidante, Lady Melbourne.
Volume IV includes all the letters from the beginning of 1814 to the end of 1815.
George Gordon 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.
The third volume starts with Byron at the first crest of his fame following the publication of Childe Harold. It includes his literary letters to Tom Moore, frank and intimate ones to Hobhouse, pungent ones to Hanson and Murray, and his lively and amusing missives to Lady Melbourne, his confidante through all his love affairs. To her he describes the backwash of his tempestuous affair with Caroline Lamb, his emotional crises with Lady Oxford, the beginning of his liaison with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and his flirtation with Lady Frances Webster. The volume contains the letters of 1813 and the journal of 1813–1814, the first of his five incomparable journals.
The letters display, as Martin Fagg puts it, a “bewitching amalgam of the picturesque and the earthy, of arrogance and modesty, of vituperation and tenderness, of soulfulness and sheer irresistible high spirits.” They confirm Max Beerbohm’s opinion, “Byron’s letters are, I think, the best ever written—the fullest and most spontaneous.”
George Gordon 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.
The first volume of Byron’s letters and journals covers his early years and includes his first pilgrimage to Greece and to the East, ending with his last letter from Constantinople on July 4, 1810, before his departure for Athens. Here is the direct record of his rapid development from the serious schoolboy to the facetious youth with ambivalent reactions to his perplexed mother, and the maturing man of extraordinary perceptions and sympathies and friendships. By the end of this volume he has already written English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (in part a spirited reaction to the reception of his earliest published work) and the first two Cantos of Childe Harold (published in 1812), which was to make him famous.
George Gordon 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.
The second volume of Byron’s letters embraces his second year in Greece, his revealing accounts to Hobhouse and others of his life in Athens, his visit to Veli Pasha, and his return by Malta to England. It covers the period of the loss of his mother and of several of his closest friends, of his first acquaintance with Moore and Rogers, his maiden speech in the House of Lords, the publication of Childe Harold, and the resulting fame that brought him into Whig society. It marks the beginning of his correspondence with Lady Melbourne, who became the confidante of his liaisons with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, and who forwarded his first (rejected) proposal to Annabella Milbanke.
Leslie A. Marchand, the author of critical studies and of the definitive biography of Byron, has brought a lifetime of study to the major task of editing these letters. He has done it with a restraint and objectivity that allows Byron to come through to us with unimpeded clarity.
George Gordon 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.
Byron’s epistolary saga continues con brio in this volume. At the start of 1818 he sends off the last canto of Childe Harold and abandons himself to the debaucheries of the Carnival in Venice. At the close of 1819 he resolves to return to England but instead follows Teresa Guiccioli to Ravenna. In the meantime he writes three long poems and two cantos of Don Juan, whose bowdlerization he violently protests; he breaks off with Marianna Segati, copes with his amorous “tigress” Margarita Cogni, then falls passionately in love with the young Countess Guiccioli; he thinks seriously of emigrating to South America; he takes custody of his little daughter Allegra and becomes increasingly fond of the child. The Shelleys visit him, as does Thomas Moore, to whom he entrusts his memoirs (burned after his death). The letters to friends are a marvelous outpouring of funny anecdotes, practical talk, discussions of his poems, statements of his beliefs. The love letters are in a class by themselves.
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