After Shakespeare the most famous British author in Europe, in Britain Byron was for years either neglected, or a victim of the myth of his own personality. Now he is read and studied both for his complex politics and as a forerunner of many of the ideas and techniques more usually associated with post-modernism. Bone tackles the critical problems both of the populism of much of Byron’s early work, and conversely of the sophisticated comedy of Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement. He argues that for all its contradictoriness Byron’s poetic mind develops organically, and that the scintillating technique of the late works grow out of the profoundly modern world-view, relativistic and secular, which had developed through his early years. Byron’s writing are seen as a vital area for post-ideological and new found criticism.
