Abstract
Byron’s attention to food anticipates the new formalist criticism of recent years by impelling the reader into pleasure in formal texture and applying the brakes of a historicist critique. While these two ways of reading are embedded in Byron’s poetry, the possibilities of an invigorated formalism have been considerably extended by critics such as Susan Wolfson and Richard Cronin.1 To a certain extent, I also follow Barbara Gelpi’s work on Shelley and her conviction that the conflicting ideologies which governed the Romantic period can only be addressed by a mixture of critical perspectives.2 Gelpi concentrates on various manifestations of maternity in Shelley’s writing, and the significance of the nursing mother for Byron is one of the topics of this essay although it will also consider other forms of feasting.
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Notes
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© 2004 Timothy Morton
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Stabler, J. (2004). Byron’s World Of Zest. In: Morton, T. (eds) Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981394_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981394_8
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