Abstract
In 1944 when the scholar Truman Guy Steffan began looking, there was no catalogue of Byron manuscripts. Steffan hunted them down piece by piece and began the process of transcription. The prevailing image of Byron in the mid-1920s was of a rapid and careless composer: Byron had not fared well in the era of New Criticism with its conspicuous quest for verbal density and multi-layered ambiguity. To those critics Byron was seen as ‘a little superficial,’ like his hero Don Juan (XI, 51, 1), and too direct to be properly difficult. There was nothing that New Critics and their immediate successors could do with him and their frustration was often vented in sharp dismissals of the ‘inability to think’ which accompanied the ‘aplomb of the improviser’ (Robson 1973, 145, 141). Steffan found, however, that his ‘preliminary transcription of the manuscripts piled up such a vast number of cancellations and rejected readings that most of them could not be crammed into an interpretative monograph about Byron’s mind and art on the composition of Don Juan’ (Steffan 1957, I, vii).
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Stabler, J. (2007). Introduction Reading Byron Now. In: Stabler, J. (eds) Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206106_1
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