Upending traditional Byron criticism to reveal a more relentlessly precise and skeptical poetic mind than ever previously thought, Jerome McGann offers numerous close readings of Byron's verse alongside that of his contemporaries to show how he challenged the limits of poetry and exposed the illusions and contradictions of his age.
Jerome McGann explores the impact of contemporary language-oriented writing on our understanding of poetic tradition and the evolution of criticism. He presents a compelling argument that this shift not only alters our perception of past poetry but also influences the future landscape of literary analysis. Through his insights, McGann encourages readers to reconsider established norms in both poetry and criticism.
Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period. Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works—the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann’s book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory—the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.