Byron's ghosts : the spectral, the spiritual and the supernatural / edited by Gavin Hopps.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hopps, Gavin, editor.

Series:

Liverpool English texts and studies ; 62.

Liverpool English texts and studies ; 62

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Supernatural in literature.

Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824--Criticism and interpretation.

Byron, George Gordon Byron.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 246 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Byron is rarely thought of as a spiritual writer. However, as this bold new collection shows, this is the result of an impoverished notion of the 'spiritual' and a reflection of biased priorities in Romantic studies. Reflecting on the poet's claim that 'immaterialism's a serious matter', this interdisciplinary collection of essays, from British and American scholars, calls into question the prevailing 'materialist' consensus, and offers a fresh and theoretically inflected reading of Byron's poetry.Byron's Ghosts is the first book-length examination of spectrality in Byron's work. It is on the one hand concerned with what Mary Shelley in her essay 'On Ghosts' refers to as 'the true old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost', though it is also a postmodern response to the 'spectral turn' in critical theory, which brings into view a range of phantom effects and 'non-Gothic' spectres. Focusing attention on these diverse modalities of the ghostly, the specially assembled essays complicate the popular image of Byron as a sceptical or 'anti-Romantic' poet and reveal a great deal about his work that could not be uncovered in any other way.

Contents:

Introduction : The re-enchantment of romanticism

Determining unknown modes of being : a map of Byron's ghosts and spirits / Bernard Beatty

Shades of being : Byron and the trespassing of ontology / Gavin Hopps

Byron and the noonday demons / Mary Hurst

Conjuration and exorcism : Byron's spectral rhetoric / Dale Townshend

Byron avec Sade : material and spectral violence in Childe Harold's pilgrimage canto IV / Piya Pal-Lapinski

"Twixt life and death" : Childe Harold's pilgrimage, Don Juan and the sublime / Philip Shaw

Byron, Ann Radcliffe and the religious implications of the explained supernatural in Don Juan / Alison Milbank

The haunting of Don Juan / Peter W. Graham

Being neither here nor there : Byron and the art of flirtation / Corin Throsby

Afterword: Blowing on a dead man's embers : Byron's biographical ghost / Peter Allender.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 11 Aug 2017).

ISBN:

1-78138-092-9

1-78138-556-4

OCLC:

863822591