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Byron, Poetics and History by Dr. Jane Stabler

Dr. Jane Stabler, from the Department of English at the University of Dundee, has received the prestigious Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature, awarded by the Council of the British Academy, for her 2003 book on the poet Lord Byron.

The winning volume: Byron, Poetics and History - published by Cambridge University Press - shares the accolade with Claire Tomalin’s work; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.

Dr. Sadler said: “It was a tremendous honour to learn that my book had been awarded a Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. The list of previous winners is an awe-inspiring read and I felt very daunted at being placed in a line that includes so many eminent scholars and critics. My work on Byron began with my PhD thesis: I have always loved Byron’s poetry and letters and it was a joy to work on a writer whose tough-minded intelligence and good humour make him such a good companion.

Unfair Advantage

“At times I felt as if I had an unfair advantage in carrying out research into such a wonderful subject, but I also worried that the sort of close historical research I was doing would freeze the vitality of Byron’s words. The quality of Byron’s writing is usually ignored in tabloid accounts of his sexual orientation(s) and much of his writing has been almost forgotten by the English reading public.

In these 270 pages Dr. Stabler offers the first full-scale examination of Byron’s poetic form in relation to the complex historical debates of his time. Responding to recent studies of publishing and audiences in the Romantic period, Dr. Stabler argues that Byron’s poetics developed in response to contemporary cultural history and his reception by the English reading public.

Drawing on extensive new archive research into Byron’s correspondence and reading, the author traces the complexity of the intertextual dialogues that run through his work. For example, the author analyses Byron’s poem Don Juan alongside the contemporary Galignani’s Messenger, the Parisian published newspaper that was Byron’s principal source of information about British politics while in Italy.

Dr. Stabler also refers to hitherto unpublished letters between Byron’s publishers and his friends, revealing a powerful impulse among his contemporaries to direct his controversial poetic style towards their own conflicting political ends.

Byron, Poetics and History - Contents:

Introduction: Byron and the poetics of digression:

Chapter 1: ‘Scorching and drenching’: discourses of digression among Byron’s readers
Chapter 2: ‘Breaches in transition’: eighteenth-century digressions and Byron’s early verse
Chapter 3: Erring with Pope: Hints from Horace and the trouble with decency
Chapter 4: Uncertain blisses: Don Juan, digressive intertextuality and the risks of reception
Chapter 5: ‘The worst of sinning’: Don Juan, moral England and feminine caprice
Chapter 6: ‘Between carelessness and trouble’: Byron’s last digressions.

Teaching

Jane Stabler continued: “When I teach Byron to my students at Dundee University, I am very aware of the excitement and enthusiasm that his poetry generates and I wanted this energy to survive in the books I am writing. It was a privilege and a great delight to share the Crawshay Award with Claire Tomalin, whose work I have admired for many years. It was wonderful to be able to meet her and the other distinguished scholars at the award ceremony in London. My parents were particularly thrilled that I had received a prize with ‘a real writer’.”

This fascinating academic study will be of interest to Byronists and, more broadly, to scholars of Romanticism in general.

The prize The British Academy - established by Royal Charter in 1902 - is the national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It is an independent, self-governing fellowship of c. 750 scholars, elected for distinction and achievement in one or more branches of the academic disciplines that make up the humanities and social sciences.

The Rose Mary Crawshay Prize itself has been established since 1888 when Mrs Rose Mary Crawshay established the Byron, Shelley, Keats In Memorium Prize fund. The administration of that fund has since passed to the Academy, who normally award two prizes each year to women who have published a work of significant value on a subject connected with English literature. However, preference for the prize is traditionally given to works regarding the poets Byron, Shelley or Keats. For more information about the activities of the British Academy, together with details of previous recipients of the prize, follow the above link.

Byron, Poetics and History by Jane Stabler is out now as a hardback only (228 x 152 mm, 270pp, priced £40.00) and is issued under the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism imprint, from Cambridge University Press. Claire Tomalins’ book Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self is published by Viking: Penguin.

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