Jerome McGann

Jerome McGann is the author of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must Be Lost.

Language Writing

Jerome McGann, 15 October 1987

In 1918, the intensity of Yeats’s fascination with the young American phenomenon Ezra Pound had cooled enough for Jack Butler Yeats to supply his son with some smouldering paternal wisdom:

Theory of Texts

Jerome McGann, 18 February 1988

A quiet yet profound change has been taking place in literary studies during the past ten years or so. Initially it was obscured by the successes and celebrities of Deconstruction, where idealist hermeneutics – this century’s dominant textual and interpretative program – led its own tradition into a theoretical impasse. The more recently touted ‘return to history’ has also obscured the nature of this change – obscured it because the so-called new historicism (I give the name un-capitalised) comprises a variety of historicisms, some new and some not, some idealist and some otherwise.’

Ezra Pound and Evil

Jerome McGann, 7 July 1988

No English-speaking poet of this century has been the subject of as much biographical scrutiny as Ezra Pound. As in the case of Byron, Pound’s literary works and his personal life were deeply entwined from the first, and this condition of his poetry’s existence raises – as Byron’s work has always raised – serious problems for our ordinary understanding of what poems do and how they are to be read.’

George Crabbe: Poetry and Truth

Jerome McGann, 16 March 1989

No one who has read Crabbe’s poetry has ever denied the power of his portraits or his stories. ‘Peter Grimes’, one of the embedded sections of his great work The Borough (1810), is justly famous, and, were it better known, the story ‘Delay has danger’, part of the very uneven Tales of the Hall (1819), would be known for what it is, a masterpiece. But Crabbe’s work, like that of the contemporary Austrian master Thomas Bernard, is still not widely read.

Umbah-Umbah

Jerome McGann, 22 June 1989

Around 529 BC the armies of the Persian Empire tried to conquer a mysterious and reclusive people who lived somewhere to the east of the Caspian Sea – to this day we do not know exactly where. The Persians acted simply because of Cyrus the Great’s overweening ambition. As it turned out, Cyrus’s armies were defeated and he was killed in the battle. The Massagetae, left once again to themselves, slipped back out of monumental history: back to their unusual customs of sex and death, to the horses for which they were famous, to their sun worship.’

His Own Dark Mind: Rescuing Lord Byron

Clare Bucknell, 30 November 2023

Byron took from Milton the idea that the mind, being ‘its own place and time’, could be its own hell. Torment in the tales and other ‘dark’ poems may be both a physical space – a dungeon, a set...

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Hail, Muse! Byron v. Shelley

Seamus Perry, 6 February 2003

Ian Gilmour’s deft and learned book is concerned with the lives of Byron and Shelley up to the morning on which Byron woke up and found himself famous. The poets weren’t to meet for...

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Why edit socially?

Marilyn Butler, 20 October 1994

Jerome McGann’s seven-volume edition of Byron’s Poems has concluded with a magnificent index compiled by Carol Pearson. As columns to browse in, these are in the same league as the

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Character Building

Peter Campbell, 9 June 1994

Books, too, have a body language. But does the way they are physically presented impinge in any significant way on the texts they contain? Jerome McGann reckons that the private press movement...

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Talk about doing

Frank Kermode, 26 October 1989

Anyone presuming to review works of modern literary theory must expect to be depressed by an encounter with large quantities of deformed prose. The great ones began it, and aspiring theorists...

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An Epiphany of Footnotes

Claude Rawson, 16 March 1989

According to Jerome McGann, poetry became desocialised as a result of Kant’s definition of the aesthetic experience as wholly and essentially subjective. A consequence for criticism ever...

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Outside the text

Marilyn Butler, 19 December 1985

In the autumn of every year schoolchildren and university students buckle down to read imaginative books by dead authors. Undergraduates reading English at Cambridge may begin with an essay on

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Death in Greece

Marilyn Butler, 17 September 1981

We can know Byron better than anyone has ever known him. Leslie Marchand’s edition of the Letters and Journals, which is far more extensive than any previous collection, has now covered...

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