
Byron and the Limits of Fiction
Liverpool University Press
Published on 1. March 1988
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-85323-026-7 (ISBN)
Description
This collection of new articles aims to answer the fundamental questions of Byron's attitude to fiction and to the limits inherent in this art form and in life itself. The book's purpose, as well as celebrating the bicentennial of Byron's birth, has been to assemble a collection of scholarly and informed articles round a particular theme. In this work the theme (given in the title) arises in two ways; first, Byron himself was passionately concerned with the nature and status of fiction and yet often sceptical of its importance. Secondly, it is a major topic of current literary criticism which is increasingly preoccupied with fictions as completely autonomous structures. Byron's poetry should be seen as a version of these concerns but also as one of the earliest deliberate challenges to them. All of Byron's major poems, together with his forays into prose fiction, are considered in this volume. Contributors pursue their own approaches but a particular emphasis of the volume as a whole is the strange immediacy of Byron's poetry, which seems to arise from both the self-consciousness of his undertaking and from his fidelity to what is rather than what is merely known or stated. The method of most contributors is to address these important topics, but substantiate their arguments by detailed reading of texts.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Liverpool
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 239 mm
Width: 163 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-85323-026-7 (9780853230267)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Bernard Beatty is Senior Fellow in the School of English at the University of Liverpool and Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity at St Andrews. From 1988 to 2005 he was Editor of the Byron Journal. In 2019 he was awarded the International Byron Societies' Lifetime Achievement Award.
Content
Fiction's limit and Eden's door, Bernard Beatty; lyric presence in Byron from the "Tales" to "Don Juan", Brian Nellist; the orientalism of Byron's "Giaour", Marilyn Butler; "Beppo" - the liberation of fiction, J. Drummond Bone; "the platitude of prose" - Byron's vampire fragment in the context of verse narratives, David Seed; authoring the self - "Childe Harold III and IV", Vincent Newey; Byron's artistry in deep and layered space, Geoffrey Ward; Byron and the sense of the dramatic, F.M. Doherty; "I leave the thing a problem, like all things" - on trying to catch up with Byron.