Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society.

Lord Byron's Strength has been long awaited by students of romanticism and, in many ways, it has been well worth the wait. For despite the achievements of critics such as Jerome McGann, Byron, unlike say Wordsworth, has been the subject of relatively few studies that can be called definitive, path-breaking, or, to use a term increasingly disparaged in contemporary critical discourse, totalizing. Thus, a study such as Christensen's, which presses an overarching view of Byron's career in a theoretically sophisticated investigation of the poets quarrel with his own commodification and, beyond that, with the literary histories in our time that seek variously to return romantic art to the material and social culture by which it is presumably bounded, is a study that many will want to read. Whether they will be able to read it, however, is another matter, for Lord Byron's Strength is neither an easy book nor an especially friendly book. In fact, it is probably as much a book about Byron (and, indeed an important book about Byron) as it is a book about Christensen and about the particular strength to which the critic, no less than the poet be admires, aspires. The difference, of course, is that where Lord Byron's strength is clearly functional and, as Christensen shows, evident in a peculiarly radical agency that has thus far been insufficiently appreciated or understood, the critic's strength is more a matter of display or self-advertisement and largely ancillary to the business of criticism. Lord Byron, according to Christensen, is strong and effective whereas Lord Byron's Strength is, more often than not, …