Book contents
- Byron in Context
- Byron in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Chronology
- Abbreviations and Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Part I Life and Works
- Part II Political, Social and Intellectual Transformations
- Part III Literary Cultures
- Chapter 17 Classicism and Neoclassicism
- Chapter 18 Epic (and Historiography)
- Chapter 19 Romance
- Chapter 20 Byron’s Lyric Practice
- Chapter 21 Satire
- Chapter 22 The Satanic School
- Chapter 23 The Lake Poets
- Chapter 24 Byron’s Accidental Muse
- Chapter 25 “Benign Ceruleans of the Second Sex!”
- Chapter 26 The Pisan Circle and the Cockney School
- Chapter 27 Drama and Theater
- Chapter 28 Autobiography
- Chapter 29 “Literatoor” and Literary Theory
- Chapter 30 Periodical Culture, the Literary Review and the Mass Media
- Part IV Reception and Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 29 - “Literatoor” and Literary Theory
from Part III - Literary Cultures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2019
- Byron in Context
- Byron in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Chronology
- Abbreviations and Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Part I Life and Works
- Part II Political, Social and Intellectual Transformations
- Part III Literary Cultures
- Chapter 17 Classicism and Neoclassicism
- Chapter 18 Epic (and Historiography)
- Chapter 19 Romance
- Chapter 20 Byron’s Lyric Practice
- Chapter 21 Satire
- Chapter 22 The Satanic School
- Chapter 23 The Lake Poets
- Chapter 24 Byron’s Accidental Muse
- Chapter 25 “Benign Ceruleans of the Second Sex!”
- Chapter 26 The Pisan Circle and the Cockney School
- Chapter 27 Drama and Theater
- Chapter 28 Autobiography
- Chapter 29 “Literatoor” and Literary Theory
- Chapter 30 Periodical Culture, the Literary Review and the Mass Media
- Part IV Reception and Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Contradiction was Byron’s keynote. He initiated his career in rhyme with a gesture of disavowal: “Poetry, however, is not my primary vocation” (CPW I: 33), the young Lord announced in the preface to Hours of Idleness (1807). Any consideration of Byron and literary theory needs to be alive to his testy relationship with what he famously dismissed as “the mart / For … poetic diction” (CPW V: 391, ll. 685–6). But it is also clear that Byron lived and breathed literature, conceiving of it as a total system. It was the material system of publishing; a court-styled marketplace run by “the Allied Sovereigns of Grub-Street” (BLJ 8: 207); a social institution that transacted the business of authorial fame and afterlife; a conversation; an experiment in thought and sense; a tribute to and tributary of the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life; and a source of life itself. As Byron asked rhetorically of Don Juan, “is it not life, is it not the thing?” (BLJ 6: 232).
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- Byron in Context , pp. 238 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019