Represents twenty-five years of McGann's work on Romanticism and Byron Studies.

Jerome J. McGann is the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia, and the Thomas Holloway Professor of Victorian Media and Culture, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Byron, Fiery Dust (1962) and Don Juan In Context (1972) and the editor of The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron (1980-1993).

Acknowledgments; General analytical and historical introduction; Part I: 1. Milton and Byron; 2. Byron and Wordsworth; 3. Byron, mobility, and the poetics of historical ventriloquism; 4. 'My brain is feminine': Byron and the poetry of deception; 5. What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?; 6. Byron and the anonymous lyric; 7. Byron and 'the truth in masquerade'; 8. Private poetry, public deception; 9. Hero with a thousand faces: the rhetoric of Byronism; 10. Byron and the lyric of sensibility; Part II: 11. A point of reference; 12. History, herstory, theirstory, ourstory; 13. Literature, meaning, and the discontinuity of fact; 14. Rethinking romanticism; 15. An interview with Jerome McGann; 16. Poetry, 1780-1832; 17. Byron and romanticism, a dialogue (Jerome McGann and the editor, James Soderholm).