The Development Of Byron S Philosophy Of Knowledge

Taking a fresh approach to Byron, this book argues that he should be understood as a poet whose major works develop a carefully reasoned philosophy. Situating him with reference to the thought of the period, it argues for Byron as an active thinker, whose final philosophical stance - reader-centred scepticism - has extensive practical implications.

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.

Byron wrote that he was “born for opposition”. This collection of essays takes Byron at his word and explores ways in which he challenged received opinion in his lifetime. The essays also challenge commonplace attitudes in criticism of Byron today. In this, the volume honours the remarkable range of work of the late Dr Peter Cochran. The matters covered here are Byron’s poetics, his ideology, and the principles and practice of editing his texts. Jerome J. McGann opens the poetics section by examining lyric writing in a Byronic perspective. In the lead essay on ideology, Bernard Beatty asks whether we should rethink Byron as a whole. A substantial addition to Byron’s correspondence is made by Andrew Stauffer beginning the editing section. In all, this book gathers original contributions from sixteen international scholars and friends of Peter Cochran. The accessible, engaging style makes their work suitable for all readers of Byron, as well as undergraduates and professional academics.

This volume contains thirty new essays by leading experts on British philosophy in the nineteenth century, and provides a comprehensive and unrivalled resource for advanced students and scholars. As well as the most celebrated figures, such as Mill, Spencer, Sidgwick, and Bradley, the Handbook discusses many other less well-known names and debates from the period, such as Whewell, Shadworth Hodgson, and Martineau. The Handbook contains six parts: Part I examines logic and scientific method from Whately through to the advent of modern formal logic; Part II discusses some of the century's most famous metaphysical systems such as those of the Scottish Common Sense school, J. F. Ferrier and F. H. Bradley; Part III covers science and philosophy, paying particular attention to positivism and the impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory; Part IV explores ethical, social, and political thought, including the lesser known themes of feminism and British Socialism; Part V concerns religious philosophy; and Part VI examines the changes which took place in the practice of philosophy itself during the nineteenth-century. Prefaced by an introductory article which contextualises and relates the various themes and controversies of the century, each chapter provides an overview of the topic under consideration and surveys of the state of current research, while at the same time offering new ideas and suggestions for future interpretation.

Byron is situated between Milton, whose suffering Satan retained more than a hint of nobility even though God's ways were supposedly justified, and Nietzsche's ubermench who in suffering the laughter of rejection and the pain of alienated righteousness, destroys the old gods and brings in the new. Byron's duality is couched within a will to do and the weakness to do not - always with the hanging question, does either path really matter? This conflict keeps Byron's humanity locked, like Pascal's paradoxical pronouncement, in "a mid-point between nothing and everything." Pope could assert in the 18th century that "Man was created half to rise and half to fall," while Byron had to struggle with if humanity was created at all, and by whom, and for what purpose? The most distilled revelation of this conflicted search for meaning within, and behind, the human condition comes in Byron's confessional narrative Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1819). In this aspiring epic, Byron presents the Visionary's "compulsive search for an ideal and a perfection that do[es] not exist in the world of reality...the unquenchable thirst for ideality and the dissatisfaction with reality."

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.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Byron and the Forms of Thought is a major new study of Byron as a poet and thinker. While informed by recent work on Byron’s philosophical contexts, the book questions attempts to describe Byron as a philosopher of a particular kind. It approaches Byron, rather, as a writer fascinated by the different ways of thinking philosophy and poetry are taken to represent. After an Introduction that explores Byron’s reception as a thinker, the book moves to a new reading of Byron’s scepticism, arguing for a close proximity, in Byron’s thought, between epistemology and poetics. This is explored through readings of Byron’s efforts both as a philosophical poet and writer of critical prose. The conclusions reached form the basis of an extended reading of Don Juan as a critical narrative that investigates connections between visionary and political consciousness. What emerges is a deeply thoughtful poet intrigued and exercised by the possibilities of literary form.

Much has been written recently on Byron as a philosopher, but Byron and the Forms of Thought is the first to thoroughly consider Byron's philosophical projects via his poetry. Anthony Howe explores Byron's poetry as a project with its own philosophical agency, arguing that readers and thinkers cannot understand Byron's intellectual force without an acute awareness of his poetic trajectory and, as such, without close critical readings of his poems. Howe revaluates many of Byron's core qualities, including his skepticism and the problems he encountered as a literary critic, closing with a provocative rereading of his epic poem Don Juan—not as satire, but as a new realization of visionary poetics. A must-read for any fan of Byron, this book is also a remarkable example of how to navigate the intersections between poetry and philosophy.