Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia.(Byron, Poetics and History)(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-05

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Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia. By STEPHEN CHEEKE. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2003. x+241 pp. 47.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1-4039-0403-0.

Byron, Poetics and History. By JANE STABLER. (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2002. xiv+251 pp. 40 [pounds sterling]; $55. ISBN 0-521-81241-0.

Readers with an interest in Byron will have encountered some of the arguments of these books before in advance articles by Stabler and Cheeke in the Byron Journal (vol. 26, 1998, and vol. 27, 1999, respectively). These were interesting, suggestive essays, here even more rewardingly contextualized into wider arguments. Stephen Cheekemakes claims for his reading as a key to understanding Byron's writing career, as a kind of metanarrative through which we might read Byron ('the notion of being there represents the most powerful and complex aspect of Byron's work, even as it is perhaps the most obvious and immediate element of Byron's enduring fame' (p. 6)). Jane Stabler refuses any greater narrative than that of particular kinds of reading--the responses of contemporary reviewers, Byron's friends, and publishers as early readers of his work in progress, and her own close attention to Byron's various kinds of textual digression. However, despite the difference in approach of the two books and even,...

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