Peter Cochran – författare

Lord Byron remains, as he was to many of his contemporaries, the defining personality of his age and time, the quintessential late-Romantic: one whose life matched the freedom of imagination and possibility of his poetry, charismatic, irresistible and shocking. The full range of his work, however, reveals a less straightforward and less stereotypical writer than this: a thinker as well as a feeler, a poet rather than merely a sensationalist, someone who justifies his towering literary reputation as much as his scandalous one.This edition of the Works contains Byron's entire poetical output, including dramas and material omitted or censored from early editions. It also presents around half of the known letters, the journals and other prose writings.The contents of the volumes are:Volume 1 (386 pp.): Introduction to the poetical works by Dr. Peter Cochran; Fugitive Pieces; Poems on Various Occasions; Hours of Idleness; Poems Original and Translated; other early poems; English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers; Hints from Horace; The Curse of Minerva; The Waltz.Volume 2 (295 pp.): Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, including stanzas excluded from the early editions and all Byron's and Hobhouse's notes and appendices.Volume 3 (426 pp.): Poems 1809–1813; The Giaour; The Bride of Abydos; The Corsair; Lara; Hebrew Melodies; Poems 1814–1816; The Siege of Corinth; Parisina; Poems of the Separation.Volume 4 (509 pp.): The Prisoner of Chillon; Poems of July–September, 1816; Manfred; The Lament of Tasso; Beppo; Ode on Venice; Mazeppa; The Prophecy of Dante; The Morgante Maggiore; Francesca of Rimini; Marino Faliero; The Vision of Judgment; Poems 1816–1823; The Blues.Volume 5 (685 pp.): Sardanapalus; The Two Foscari; Cain; Heaven and Earth; Werner; The Deformed Transformed; The Age of Bronze; The Island.Volume 6 (689 pp.): Don Juan.Volume 7 (87 pp.): minor poems and jeux d'esprit.Volume 8 (204 pp.): Introduction to the prose works by Dr. Peter Cochran; letters, to August 1811.Volume 9 (352 pp.): letters, August 1811 to December 1813; journal, November 1813 to April 1814; articles from the Monthly Review; Parliamentary speeches.Volume 10 (266 pp.): letters, January 1814 to November 1816; journal for Augusta, September 1816; a fragment of a novel.Volume 11 (355 pp.): letters, November 1816 to March 1820; translations from Armenian; unfinished skit on Sotheby's Tour; letter to the editor of "My Grandmother's Review"; reply to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.Volume 12 (358 pp.): letters, April 1820 to December 1821; extracts from journal, January to February 1821; "My Dictionary"; Detached Thoughts; the two letters on Bowles and Pope; draft of an address to the Neapolitan insurgents; notes on Bacon's apophthegms and Voltaire.Volume 13 (261 pp.): letters, January 1822 on; two late prose fragments; additional letters; undated letters to Lady Melbourne.All of the Works have been newly typeset for this edition. The basis of the texts is Ernest Hartley Coleridge's edition of the poetry and Rowland E. Prothero's edition of the prose (as published uniformly, London: John Murray, 1898). Further letters have been added from the texts in John Murray, ed., Lord Byron's Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1922, 2 vols.), Ralph, Earl of Lovelace, Astarte (London: Scribner's, 1921), and material supplied by Peter Cochran drawing on the B.L. Loan 70 collection and other sources, and incorporated silently into the chronological sequence and numbering of the series. Additional poems and portions of Childe Harold initially suppressed have been supplied from the online edition by Peter Cochran (www.internationalbyronsociety.org) and incorporated into the sequence.

Byron and Bob is the first book ever to be dedicated to the most important literary relationship in Byron's career – that with the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, whom he hated, and to whom he "dedicated" his most important poem, Don Juan. Drawing on much unseen manuscript material, Peter Cochran shows that although Byron's antipathy towards Southey was at first a normal literary distaste, it became, the more he ingested his private image of Southey, a projected self-distrust, a dislike of everything in himself with which he was unhappy.The book has as appendix a double edition of the two Visions of Judgement, firstly Southey's original, and then Byron's travesty, in which he has succeeded in rendering his enemy ridiculous to all succeeding generations. These two important works have not been published together for many years.

The Gothic Byron examines in detail the Gothic element in Byron's work, arguing that it has traditionally been undervalued. It looks closely at his reading in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and Charlotte Dacre, and then discusses the Gothic elements in his Turkish Tales, plays, and satirical poetry, ending with two essays on Don Juan. Further essays explore the indebtedness of several European and English writers, including Charlotte and Emily Brontë, to the Gothic element in Byron's poetry.

Byron and Women [and men] is a compilation of new biographical and literary essays, examining the poet's bisexuality and the ways in which it affected his poetry and drama. Areas covered are Byron and gender-studies (a general introduction); Byron's Boyfriends (an aspect of his life which has traditionally been neglected); the Male Gaze in the Oriental Tales; homosexuality in Venice; Byron's Nottinghamshire love-life; sex and gender in Don Juan; bisexuality in Byron and Shakespeare; and Byron's heroines contrasted with those of Mozart. The volume has as appendices new editions of the notorious poems Don Leon and Leon to Annbella, with startling theories as to their authorship.

Byron's Religions is the most comprehensive study yet of the poet's deep, diverse and eclectic attitude to religion. The articles, by several well-known and distinguished scholars, cover many of his poems and plays, taking in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Blasphemy, Calvinism, Gnosticism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism. The tentative conclusion is that Byron was never the atheist which the cliché has him to be, but a man whose profound need for a faith clashed always with an equally profound scepticism.

Byron's dubious status as a sex object, and his even more dubious status as a political icon, serves to disguise the fact that he is one of the greatest of all English poets, with a European reputation second only to Shakespeare. The fact that writers such as Goethe and Pushkin held him in the highest regard ensures that the English continue to despise him, and ignore his verse as much as possible.This book ignores his sexuality, his politics, and his iconography, and concentrates on his poems. Written by leading authorities such as Bernard Beatty, Germaine Greer and Michael O'Neill, it contains essays on his verse-forms and his comic rhymes, as well as thematic analyses on such recurrent Byronic themes as the Sea, Will-o'-the-Wisps, and Love versus Knowledge. In the face of many modern books which translate his verse into prose and try without success to analyse the result, Byron's Poetry puts his real achievement – as a creative writer – back into the focus of discussion.