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Byron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher is the first comprehensive account of the relationship between Byron and the man who published his poetry for over ten years. It is commonly seen as a paradox of Byron’s literary career that the liberal poet was published by a conservative publishing house. It is less of a paradox when, as this book illustrates, we see John Murray as a competitive, innovative publisher who understood how to deal with his most famous author. The book begins by charting the early years of Murray’s success prior to the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and describes Byron’s early engagement with the literary marketplace. The book describes in detail how Byron became one of Murray’s authors, before documenting the success of their commercial association and the eventual and protracted disintegration of their relationship. Byron wrote more letters to John Murray than anyone else and their correspondence represents a fascinating dialogue on the nature of Byron’s poetry, and particularly the nature of his fame. It is the central argument of this book that Byron’s ambivalent attitude towards professional writing and popular literature can be illuminated through an understanding of his relationship with John Murray.

A collection of original and previously unpublished essays concerned with the function of scholarship in both the invention and the reception of Milton’s writings in poetry and prose. Following the editors’ introduction to the collection, the eleven essays examine the nature of Milton’s own formidable scholarship and its implications for his prose and poetry–“scholarly Milton” the writer–as well as subsequent scholars’ historical and theoretical framing of Milton studies as an object of scholarly attention–“scholarly Milton” as at first an emergent and later an established academic discipline. The essays are particularly concerned with the topics of the ethical ends of learning, of Milton’s attention to the trivium within the Renaissance humanist educational system, and the development of scholarly commentary on Milton’s writings.

This book is the first academic study entirely devoted to Liverpool labouring-class poet and activist Edward Rushton (1756-1814), whose name was for a long time only associated with the foundation of the Royal School for the Blind in 1791. A former sailor, tavern keeper and editor of a paper, as of the turbulent 1790s Rushton owned a bookshop that was a hub of intense networking with many radical writers and intellectuals. His long-lasting, consistent commitment to the most pressing debates enflaming the Age of Revolution led him to question naval impressment and British repression in Ireland, the Napoleonic wars lacerating Europe and, most prominently, both the transatlantic traffic in human beings and the institution of slavery as such. A dedicated and unrelenting campaigner at the time of the dawning human rights discourse, Rushton was both a perceptive scrutinizer of the mechanisms of power and repression, and a remarkably complex poetic voice, fully consequent to his politics. In this book his work is the object of new and long-due critical enquiry, especially appropriate in the year that marks the bicentennial anniversary of his death. The opening up of eighteenth-century and Romantic studies to cross-disciplinary interchange allows for a more nuanced historical and critical investigation of previously erased or neglected individual and collective experiences. This expanding critical space, which highlights the systemic discursive interaction of culture, politics and society, constitutes the conceptual and methodological frame for what is intended as a comprehensive critical re-evaluation of the writer.