Byron and the Limits of Fiction (Utp Correspondence James Polk) (Volume 22)

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. Title Page......Page 4 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgements......Page 8 Preface......Page 9 Abbreviations......Page 11 Introduction: 'Subject unto chaunge': Spenser's Complaints and the New Poetry......Page 12 Part One: The Translations......Page 48 1: 'Clowdie teares': Poetic and Doctrinal Tensions in Virgils Gnat......Page 50 2: Forming the 'first garland of free Poësie' in France and England, 1558-91......Page 74 Part Two: The Major Complaints......Page 108 3: The Major Complaints......Page 110 4: Poetry's 'liuing tongue' in The Teares of the Muses......Page 144 5: Cracking the Nut? Mother Hubberds Tale's Attack on Traditional Notions of Poetic Value......Page 180 6: 'Excellent device and wondrous slight': Muiopotmos and Complaints' Poetics......Page 224 7: The New Poetry beyond the Complaints......Page 266 Appendix: Urania-Astraea and 'Divine Elisa' in The Teares of the Muses (ll. 527-88)......Page 282 Bibliography......Page 286 Index......Page 300