New book review

Book Reviews - Omar F. Miranda, The Wordsworth CircleVolume 55, Number 3,

University of Chicago Press, July 2025, Bernard Beatty, Reading Byron. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. xvi+266 pp. £90.00. Jerome McGann, Byron and the Poetics of Adversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xi+214 pp. US$25.99. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/732754

A short excerpt of the review (read in full on the link above) -

"Although Byron had considered aiding the Bolivarian rebellions in South America

alongside his daughter, Allegra, he ultimately chose to support the Hellenic cause of liberty

against Ottoman Turkish occupation. Today the English-Scottish author is considered a

Greek national hero. In the early months of this year, especially around the anniversary of

Byron’s death on April 19, several mainstream newspapers reminded the world about the

poet and his lasting influence: “Lord Byron was More than Just Byronic”(New Yorker,

February 26, 2024);“Letter about Byron’s lost mem oirs discovered in Cambridge” (BBC,

April 18, 2024); “Lord Byron Was Hard to Pin Down. That’s What Made Him Great” (New

York Times, April 19, 2024); “Two Centuries on, Greece loves Byron more than ever” (The

Guardian, April 21, 2024). 

To our good fortune, numerous events and publications have helped make this bicentenary

an extraordinary commemoration of Byron and his legacy. As organizers of the 47th Annual

International Association of Byron Societies (IABS) Conference in August 2023, both Kaila

Rose and I kicked off the series of global celebrations in California. We wel comed scholars

from around the world at the University of San Francisco for five days of stimulating papers

and various gatherings across the Bay Area, including an exclusive tour of the famous City

Lights Bookstore. Earlier this year, Andrew Stauffer inaugurated the 2024 commemorative

spirit with the release of his excellent biography, Byron: A Life in Ten Letters (Cambridge

University Press, 2024), while also partnering with Jonathan Sachs to coedit and publish a

new edition of Byron’s works around the same time: Lord Byron: Selected Writings(Oxford

University Press). In May, Jane Stabler and Gavin Hopps published their Longman edition

of all seventeen cantos of Don Juan (Routledge). A range of celebratory and commemo

rative programming has followed at Trinity College in Cambridge, the House of Lords in

Parliament, and Westminster Abbey. Byron scholars have converged for symposia at Trinity

(April), Newstead Abbey (April), Notre Dame campus in Rome (June), and in Athens and

Messolonghi (July). Later this year, Maria Schoina and Alexander Grammatikos will have

their coedited volume, Byron and Translation, published by Liver pool University Press.

Finally, in October, I will collaborate once more with Red Bull Theater in New York City

(redbulltheater.com) to put on a staged reading of Byron’s Sardanapalus: A Tragedy (1821),

a perfor mance that is open to the public and cosponsored by the Keats-Shelley As sociation

of America, the Byron Society of America, and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, Italy.

Professional theater artists, including equity actors

..."