" Byron was -- to echo Wordsworth -- half-perceived and half-created. He would have affirmed Jean Baudrillard's observation that "to seduce is to die to reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion." But among the readers he seduced, in person and in poetry, were women possessed of vivid imaginations who collaborated with him in fashioning his legend. Accused of "treating women harshly," Byron acknowledged: "It may be so -- but I have been their martyr. My whole life has been sacrificed to them and by them." Those whom he spell bound often returned the favor in their own writings tried to remake his public image to reflect their own. Through writings both well known and generally unknown, James Soderholm examines the poet's relationship with five women: Elizabeth Pigot, Caroline Lamb, Annabella Milbanke, Teresa Guiccioli, and Marguerite Blessington. These women participated in Byron's life and literary career and the manipulation of images that is the Byron legend. Soderholm argues against the sentimental depictions of biographers who would preserve Byron's romantic aura by diminishing the contributions of these women to his social, sexual, and literary identity. By restoring the contexts in which literary works charm or bedevil particular readers, the author shows the consequences of Byron's poetic seductions during and after his life.

This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by a leading critic of Romanticism in general and Byron in particular. It demonstrates McGann's evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian, and his engagement with the main schools of literary criticism since the advent of structuralism in the 1960s. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now for the first time McGann's important and influential work on Byron can be appreciated by new generations of students and scholars.

This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by a leading critic of Romanticism in general and Byron in particular. It demonstrates McGann's evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian, and his engagement with the main schools of literary criticism since the advent of structuralism in the 1960s. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now for the first time McGann's important and influential work on Byron can be appreciated by new generations of students and scholars.