This landmark collection discusses the condition of the subject of English in UK higher education and elsewhere. It understands 'English' not as idealistic or theoretical concept, but as practice made material in institutional, theoretical and human contexts. Ranging across a variety of practices undertaken under the name of English in the UK, Europe, India, Africa, Australia and the US, the book confronts what we teach, how we teach and why we teach one of the most popular university disciplines at the start of the twenty-first century.

This book is a major reappraisal of Byron's poetry, which grapples firmly with the paradox of his work - that in spite of his enormous influence, the magnetic power of his personality, and the fascination of his life, the poetry is often of inferior quality and so inconsistent in its attitudes that Byron's poetic seriousness is inevitably called into question. The focus of the book is the nature of Byron's relationship with his public and its effect on his poetry; a subject that has remained largely unexplored. Dr Martin considers Byron's anomalous position as an aristocrat in a literary market governed by commercial interests and middle class tastes and reading habits. He suggests that the whole of Byron's poetry can be seen as a performance determined by a number of factors: Byron's anxieties about his modernity, his contemporaries, and the image his readers were ready to fashion for him.

This collection of essays by leading and new British scholars demonstrates the different ways in which Romanticism is currently being revalued and reconceived. No longer are scholars working within the constraints of the old canon which insisted on the division of the central and the marginal, for new Romanticism is being realised as a wider range of cultural activity unconfined by genre, gender, class, rhetoric or style.

This collection of essays by leading and new British scholars demonstrates the different ways in which Romanticism is currently being revalued and reconceived. No longer are scholars working within the constraints of the old canon which insisted on the division of the central and the marginal, for new Romanticism is being realised as a wider range of cultural activity unconfined by genre, gender, class, rhetoric or style.