Jonathan David Gross. Byron: the Erotic Liberal.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 200L Pp. xi + 230. $78.00 cloth/$21.95 paper.

The habit of taking liberties with freedom has a long history, and an especially revealing one at times when "freedom itself" (to use the proprietorial words of George W. Bush) is a prominent theme in public discourse. To mention President Bush here is not as intrusive as it might seem to some, because the book under review takes pains to connect events and concerns of the romantic period to the "Liberal Imagination in America," linking in particular Byron and the Cold War, Lord Castlereagh and Henry Kissinger. In playing up the fact that he is writing about the past from a very specific present, Jonathan Gross makes his work more stimulating and also more vulnerable to dismissal as opportunistic, or unscholarly, or unduly ideological. In my view this is a risk worth taking because the result...

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