Ebook: Byron's Ghosts : The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural

Byron is rarely thought of as a spiritual writer. However, as this bold new collection shows, this is the result of an impoverished notion of the OCyspiritualOCO and a reflection of biased priorities in Romantic studies. Reflecting on the poetOCOs claim that OCyimmaterialismOCOs a serious matterOCO, this interdisciplinary collection of essays, from British and American scholars, calls into question the prevailing OCymaterialistOCO consensus, and offers a fresh and theoretically inflected reading of ByronOCOs poetry.ByronOCOs Ghosts is the first book-length examination of spectrality in ByronOCOs work. It is on the one hand concerned with what Mary Shelley in her essay OCyOn GhostsOCO refers to as OCythe true old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghostOCO, though it is also a postmodern response to the OCyspectral turnOCO in critical theory, which brings into view a range of phantom effects and OCynon-GothicOCO spectres. Focusing attention on these diverse modalities of the ghostly, the specially assembled essays complicate the popular image of Byron as a sceptical or OCyanti-RomanticOCO poet and reveal a great deal about his work that could not be uncovered in any other way."