The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe has had a rough ride in America, as Emerson s sneering quip about The Jingle Man testifies. That these poems have never lacked a popular audience has been a persistent annoyance in academic and literary circles; that they attracted the admiration of innovative poetic masters in Europe and especially France notably Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery has been further cause for embarrassment. Jerome McGann offers a bold reassessment of Poe s achievement, arguing that he belongs with Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence.

Not all American commentators have agreed with Emerson s dim view of Poe s verse. For McGann, a notable exception is William Carlos Williams, who said that the American poetic imagination made its first appearance in Poe s work. "The Poet Edgar Allan Poe" explains what Williams and European admirers saw in Poe, how they understood his poetics, and why his poetry had such a decisive influence on Modern and Post-Modern art and writing. McGann contends that Poe was the first poet to demonstrate how the creative imagination could escape its inheritance of Romantic attitudes and conventions, and why an escape was desirable. The ethical and political significance of Poe s work follows from what the poet takes as his great subject: the reader.

The Poet Edgar Allan Poe" takes its own readers on a spirited tour through a wide range of Poe s verse as well as the critical and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas about poetry and poetics."

A long line of traditional, often conservative, criticism and cultural commentary deplored Byron as a slipshod poet. This pithy yet aptly poetic book, written by one of the world's foremost Romantic scholars, argues that assessment is badly mistaken. Byron's great subject is what he called 'Cant': the habit of abusing the world through misusing language. Setting up his poetry as a laboratory to investigate failures of writing, reading, and thinking, Byron delivered sharp critical judgment on the costs exacted by a careless approach to his Mother Tongue. Perspicuous readings of Byron alongside some of his Romantic contemporaries - Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley - reveal Byron's startling reconfiguration of poetry as a 'broken mirror' and shattered lamp. The paradoxical result was to argue that his age's contradictions, and his own, offered both ethical opportunities and a promise of poetic - broadly cultural - emancipation. This book represents a major contribution to ideas about Romanticism.

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.

Martin R. Delany's Blake (1859, 1861-1862) is one of the most important African American-and indeed American-works of fiction of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Henry Blake's escape from a southern plantation and his subsequent travels across the United States, into Canada, and to Africa and Cuba. His mission is to unite the black populations of the American Atlantic regions, both free and slave, in the struggle for freedom, whether through insurrection or through emigration and the creation of an independent black state. Blake is a rhetorical masterpiece, all the more strange and mysterious for remaining incomplete, breaking off before its final scene. This edition of Blake, prepared by textual scholar Jerome McGann, offers the first correct printing of the work in book form. It establishes an accurate text, supplies contextual notes and commentaries, and presents an authoritative account of the work's composition and publication history. In a lively introduction, McGann argues that Delany employs the resources of fiction to develop a critical account of the interconnected structure of racist power as it operated throughout the American Atlantic. He likens Blake to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in its willful determination to transform a living and terrible present. Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition will be used in undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of African American fiction, on the history of the American novel, and on black cultural studies. General readers will welcome as well the first reliable edition of Delany's fiction.

Jerome McGann's Poetics of Sensibility represents the most significant intervention in Romantic studies since his earlier book The Romantic Ideology. It takes as its prime aim the reading of neglected poetry, principally by women, which qualifies as either poetry of sensibility or poetry of sentiment. It is certain to provoke discussion among anyone interested in the hundred years of poetry it considers. Writers discussed include: Ann Batten Cristall, Benardin, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Gray, Frances Greville, Felicia Hemans, William Jones, Keats, Ossian, Mary Robinson, Schiller, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley.

Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period. Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties-"a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records." A noted scholar of the "textual conditions" of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather's Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin's celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works-the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann's book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory-the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.

A manifesto for the humanities in the digital age, A New Republic of Letters" argues that the history of texts, together with the methods by which they are preserved and made available for interpretation, are the overriding subjects of humanist study in the twenty-first century. Theory and philosophy, which have grounded the humanities for decades, no longer suffice as an intellectual framework. Jerome McGann proposes we look instead to philology--a discipline which has been out of fashion for many decades but which models the concerns of digital humanities with surprising fidelity.

For centuries, books have been the best way to preserve and transmit knowledge. But as libraries and museums digitize their archives and readers abandon paperbacks for tablet computers, digital media are replacing books as the repository of cultural memory. While both the mission of the humanities and its traditional modes of scholarship and critical study are the same, the digital environment is driving disciplines to work with new tools that require major, and often very difficult, institutional changes. Now more than ever, scholars need to recover the theory and method of philological investigation if the humanities are to meet their perennial commitments. Textual and editorial scholarship, often marginalized as a narrowly technical domain, should be made a priority of humanists' attention.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) is, with Browning and Tennyson, one of the touchstone Victorian poets. He was a major critic and an important fiction writer as well. Emerging out of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, his bold and innovative work made him both a celebrated and controversial writer at home and a figure of international importance. Hugo, Baudelaire, and Mallarme were among his great admirers.
Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh now present a generous sampling of Swinburne's poetry and prose. This wide-ranging collection satisfies a long need for a comprehensive selection of Swinburne's work. It is accompanied by learned and critically incisive commentaries and notes.