Jerome J. McGann - Böcker

Byron was a legend in his own lifetime and the dominant influence on the Romantic movement. The most European of the English writers in an age of revolution, Byron was deeply involved in contemporary events, and a passionate supporter of the struggle for Greek independence. Describing himself as `born for opposition', his work was largely directed against what he called the `cant political, cant poetical, and cant moral' of the English and European worlds. He was rocketed to fame by the publication of Childe Harold in 1812, and lionized by society until his departure from England amid a whirlpool of private gossip and newspaper scandal in 1816. His is, in every sense, a poetry of experience, and a Romantic emphasis on the personality of the poet is the hallmark of all his verse. Relishing humour and irony, daring and flamboyant, sardonic yet idealistic, his work encompasses a sweeping range of topics, subjects, and models, embracing the most traditional and the most experimental poetic forms. This selection of the poetical works, chosen from the Oxford Authors critical edition, includes such masterpieces as The Corsair, Manfred, Bebbo, and Don Juan. There are many other less familiar works and shorter lyrics, and Jerome J. McGann's introduction and notes give fascinating insight into Byron's world. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This book examines the function of truth in poetry in an age when both knowledge and truth have been defined in empirical and scientific terms. Professor McGann argues that for two hundred years imaginative writing has been seen as a literature of power rather than a literature of knowledge - a view standing at the core of all Kantian and Romantic aesthetics, which, throughout that time, have dominated the ideas of Euro-American studies. Emerging from the postmodern critique of those traditions, he considers the work of four writers of the period - Blake, Byron, D. G. Rossetti, and Pound - in discussing ways in which poetry may be seen to possess truth-functions and to constitute a pursuit of knowledge.Towards a Literature of Knowledge was delivered as the Clark Lecture at Trinity College, and as the Carpenter Lecture at the University of Chicago, both in 1988. It is the fifth and final work in a series which began in 1983 with The Romantic Ideology. Among the related works, The Beauty of Inflections (OUP, 1985) is now available in paperback (Clarendon Paperbacks, #12.95).

This collection of studies, which spans the past decade, was first published in hardback in 1985. As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of ahistorical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, it develops a fully elaborated socio-historical criticism for literary works. It achieves this by means of four special sets of investigations: into the relation between the so-called 'autonomous' poem and its political/historical contexts; into the relation of reception and history to literary interpretation; into the problems of canon and the characterization of period; and, finally, into the ideological dimensions of both literary works and the criticism of such works. Whilst focusing largely on nineteenth-century works - among them those of Keats, Byron, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti - its arguments are applicable to literary studies in general, and its emphasis throughout is theoretical and methodological.'... an outstandingly good book.' John Lucas, Times Literary Supplement'The essays exhibit wide and careful reading in the service of a criticism that is refreshing, even moving, in its advocacy of an old poetical ideal.' Victorian Poetry'Few practising critics can speak concurrently on scholarly, critical, and theoretical issues with the authority of McGann... The Beauty of Inflections represents a major practical and theoretical intervention.' Modern Language Notes

To be completed in six volumes, this work represents the first comprehensive re-editing of Byron's poetry in over 75 years. The editor's commentaries about the texts and contexts of Byron's works reflect the access to a vast amount of original documents and manuscripts.

This volume completes the Oxford English Texts edition of Byron's Poetical Works. Included here are the poems from the last two years of Byron's life, 1823-4, when he decided to leave Italy to join the Greeks in their struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Three major works date from this period - the neglected late satire, The Age of Bronze; Byron's treatment of the Bounty mutiny, The Island; and his greatest lyric poem, `January 22nd 1824. Messalonghi. On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year.' Several new poems are added to the corpus, two in the regular sequence of works set down in 1980, and three others in Appendix C.An important feature of this volume is its set of appendices dealing with the corpus of Byron's work. Of special signficance are those detailing all relevant information about attributed and spurious Byron poems. This material is important not only for establishing a reliable corpus of the work, but also as a fundamental resource for the study of the Byron legend. Included here are the texts of newly authenticated poems and of attributed poems which have some reasonable claim to authenticity, as well as a list of unauthentic poems. The latter augments the list given in Volume I of this edition. This material is followed by a discussion of Byron forgeries; and a list of corrections and additions to Volumes I-V.This volume also contains comprehensive indexes of titles, of first lines, and of all the poems by volume and page number, and a general index.

The Complete Poetical Works Volume 2

The Complete Poetical Works Volume 3

This is volume four of the landmark edition of Byron's poetry. Indispensable for Byron scholars, it represents the most comprehensive editing of his poetry ever undertaken.

The Complete Poetical Works Volume 5: Don Juan

NB - VOL VII HAS THE BLURB FOR BOTH VOLS - ELSP89 This volume is the penultimate one in the Oxford English Texts Byron, described by Ian Jack as 'one of the finest editions we have of any of the Romantic poets'. It contains all the works of 1821 and 1822, including all Byron's late plays - The Two Foscari, Sardanapalus, Cair: A Mystery, (publication of which gave rise to threats of prosecution against the publisher, John Murray), and the unfinished The Deformed Transformed. As usual, the works are given with textual annotation at the foot of the page, and there is a full introdution and extensive annotation at the end of the volume.

The Complete Poetical Works Volume 3

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Byron's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by important letters, journals, and conversations - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Byron is regarded today as the ultimate Romantic, whose name has entered the language to describe a man of brooding passion. Although his private life shocked his contemporaries his poetry was immensely popular and influential, especially in Europe. This comprehensive edition includes the complete texts of his two poetic masterpieces Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, as well as the dramatic poems Manfred and Cain. There are many other shorter poems and part of the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In addition there is a selection from Byron's inimitable letters, extracts from his journals and conversations, as well as more formal writings. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

For Jerome McGann, the purpose of scholarship is to preserve and pass on cultural heritage, a feat accomplished through discussion among scholars and interested nonspecialists. In "The Scholar's Art", a collection of thirteen essays, McGann both addresses and exemplifies that discussion and the vocation it supports. Of particular interest to McGann is the demise of public discourse about poetry. That poetry has become recondite is, to his mind, at once a problem for how scholars do their work and a general cultural emergency. "The Scholar's Art" asks what could be gained by reimagining the way scholars have codified the literary and cultural history of the past two hundred years, and goes on to provide a series of case studies that illustrate how scholarly method can help bring about such reimaginings. McGann closes with a discussion of technology's ability to harness the reimagination of cultural memory and concludes with exemplary acts of critical reflection.Astute observation from one of America's most bracing and original commentators on the place of literature in twenty-first century culture, "The Scholar's Art" proposes new ways - cultural, philological, and technological - to reimagine our literary past and future.

For Jerome McGann, the purpose of scholarship is to preserve and pass on cultural heritage, a feat accomplished through discussion among scholars and interested nonspecialists. In "The Scholar's Art", a collection of thirteen essays, McGann both addresses and exemplifies that discussion and the vocation it supports. Of particular interest to McGann is the demise of public discourse about poetry. That poetry has become recondite is, to his mind, at once a problem for how scholars do their work and a general cultural emergency. "The Scholar's Art" asks what could be gained by reimagining the way scholars have codified the literary and cultural history of the past two hundred years, and goes on to provide a series of case studies that illustrate how scholarly method can help bring about such reimaginings. McGann closes with a discussion of technology's ability to harness the reimagination of cultural memory and concludes with exemplary acts of critical reflection.Astute observation from one of America's most bracing and original commentators on the place of literature in twenty-first century culture, "The Scholar's Art" proposes new ways - cultural, philological, and technological - to reimagine our literary past and future.

Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology—by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations—Jerome J. McGann presents a new, critical view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism. In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities.

Over the past decade literary critic and editor Jerome McGann has developed a theory of textuality based in writing and production rather than in reading and interpretation. These new essays extend his investigations of the instability of the physical text. McGann shows how every text enters the world under socio-historical conditions that set the stage for a ceaseless process of textual development and mutation. Arguing that textuality is a matter of inscription and articulation, he explores texts as material and social phenomena, as particular kinds of acts. McGann links his study to contextual and institutional studies of literary works as they are generated over time by authors, editors, typographers, book designers, marketing planners, and other publishing agents. This enables him to examine issues of textual stability and instability in the arenas of textual production and reproduction. Drawing on literary examples from the past two centuries--including works by Byron, Blake, Morris, Yeats, Joyce, and especially Pound--McGann applies his theory to key problems facing anyone who studies texts and textuality.

"English literature," Yeats once noted, "has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press." Finding this true particularly of modernist writing, Jerome McGann demonstrates the extraordinary degree to which modernist styles are related to graphic and typographic design, to printed letters--"black riders" on a blank page--that create language for the eye. He sketches the relation of modernist writing to key developments in book design, beginning with the nineteenth-century renaissance of printing, and demonstrates the continued interest of postmodern writers in the "visible language" of modernism. McGann then offers a philosophical investigation into the relation of knowledge and truth to this kind of imaginative writing. Exploring the work of writers like William Morris, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Laura Riding and Bob Brown, he shows how each exploits the visibilities of language, often by aligning their work with older traditions of so-called Adamic language. McGann argues that in modernist writing, philosophical nominalism emerges as a key aesthetic point of departure.Such writing thus develops a pragmatic and performative "answer to Plato" in the matter of poetry's relation to truth and philosophy.

In ""Victorian Connections"", each contributor was asked to write about anything in the Victorian period, with only one proviso: that the essay seek to draw connections with other disciplines, fields, periods, methodologies or authors. The compliment the essays pay to each other - the way they complement each other - lies in their diversity. Another feature of the book is the way it grounds its work in a particular historical and institutional context. That context is then illustrated in the succeeding essays. These essays, at once theoretically literate and historically rigorous, define the shape that Victorian studies will be taking in the immediate future.

This work initiated a major shift in literary theory and method when it was first published in 1983. Starting from a critical inquiry into certain specialised issues in the practice of editing, "A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism" gradually unfolds an argument for a general revaluation of the grounds of literary study as a whole. McGann's point of departure is the controversy he opens with the once-dominant line of traditional textual and editorial scholarships as it evolved through the fundamental work of W.W. Greg, Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Transelle. In departing from the canonical approach to the technical question of copy-text, McGann argues that theory of text must ground itself in a recovery of the entire productive and reproductive history of the text. His book proposes combining literary criticism and bibliographical scholarship with social, institutional and collaborative models of creation and production. Although focused on cases located in the past 200 years, "A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism" has had a wide-ranging influence on the scholarship of all literary periods. It is one of the seminal works of modern textual theory.

In Victorian Connections, each contributor was asked to write about anything in the Victorian period, with only one proviso: that the essay seek to draw connections with other disciplines, fields, periods, methodologies or authors. The compliment the essays pay to each other - the way they complement each other - lies in their diversity. Another feature of the book is the way it grounds its work in a particular historical and institutional context. That context is then illustrated in the succeeding essays. These essays, at once theoretically literate and historically rigorous, define the shape that Victorian studies will be taking in the immediate future.

In this book, Jerome McGann argues that contemporary language-oriented writing implies a marked change in the way we think about our poetic tradition on one hand and in the future of criticism on the other. He focuses on Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein as important intellectual resources because both see the history of poetry as a crisis of the present rather than as a legacy of the past. The crisis appears as a poetic deficit in contemporary culture, where values of politics and morality are judged prima facie more important than aesthetic values. McGann argues for the fundamental relevance of the aesthetic dimension and the contemporary relevance of cultural works of the past. McGann moves through several broad categories in his examination of contemporary poetry, including the ways in which poetry must be abstract, change, and give pleasure. The author draws on sources ranging from the poetry of Bruce Andrews and Robert Duncan to Looney Tunes cartoons. The experimental move in contemporary poetry, McGann contends, is an emergency signal for readers and critics as much as it is for writers and poets, a signal that calls us to rethink the aesthetics of criticism. The interpretation of literary works has been dominated by enlightenment models - the expository essay and monograph - for almost two hundred years. With the emergence of new media, especially digital culture, the limitations of those models have grown increasingly apparent. ""The Point Is To Change It"" explores alternative critical methods and provides a powerful call to reinvent our modes of investigation in order to escape the limitations of our inherited academic models. The goal of this process is to widen existing cracks or create new ones because, as McGann points out via the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, ""That's how the light gets in.