Byron in Context

George Gordon the sixth Lord Byron (17881824) was one of the most celebrated poets of the Romantic period as well as a peer politician and global celebrity famed not only for his verse but for his controversial lifestyle and involvement in the Greek War of Independence. In thirty-seven concise accessible essays by leading international scholars this volume explores the social and intertextual relationships that informed Byron''s writing; the geopolitical contexts in which he travelled lived and worked; the cultural and philosophical movements that influenced changing outlooks on religion science modern society and sexuality; the dramatic landscape of war conflict and upheaval that shaped Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Europe and Regency Britain; and the diverse cultures of reception that mark the ongoing Byron phenomenon as a living ecology in the twenty-first century. This volume illuminates how we might think of Byron in context but also as a context in his own right.