Byron''s Ghosts - The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural

"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" --

Product details

• Authors: Gavin Hopps, Gavin (University of St. Andrews) Hopps
• Assisted by: Gavin Hopps (Editor), Gavin (University of St. Andrews) Hopps (Editor)
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.10.2013
• EAN: 9781846319709
• ISBN: 978-1-84631-970-9
• No. of pages: 246
• Series: Liverpool English Texts and Studies; Liverpool University Press - L; Liverpool English Texts and Studies; Liverpool English Texts and St
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies