" 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.

This call to restore a sense of beauty to our culture will serve
as a bellwether of the future of literary studies.

"Beauty and the Critic "brings together well-known
members of the literary academy to reassert the importance of "aesthetic
criticism" and the treatment of literature as art.

The contributors are responding to what the editor calls
"the banality of partisanship of literary criticism in this country."
The common focus is a shared suspicion of critics who are only interested
in reducing authors and their works to ideological elements, thereby mostly
ignoring what makes their writings distinctive as works of art. This focus,
however, by no means represents a curmudgeonly reaction or a united front.
Indeed, the collection's strength is precisely its rich diversity even
as the contributors struggle with familiar problems in contemporary criticism,
including the problem of the increasing distance between the language of
the professoriate and the language of the general reader.

This collection of essays by its very nature does not
present a solution to the problem but demonstrates that critics still have
many ways to approach literature that attend to its peculiar idiom and
its distinctive achievement. The essays suggest that the profession of
literature is undergoing a sea change, not necessarily for the better,
and that popular models of interpretation have become rote, shopworn conventions--techniques
that replace thought rather than express it. James Soderholm and his colleagues
invite us to restore a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity to the study
of literature.