Clement Tyson Goode, Jr. ed. George Gordon, Lord Byron: A Comprehensive, Annotated Research Bibliography of Secondary Materials in English 1973-1994. Lanham and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1997. ISBN: 0-8108-3186-4. Price: £90.25

Clement Tyson Goode has devoted a lifetime to bibliographical research into Byron. The present volume represents the culmination of his painstaking labours and should be regarded as a continuation of his and Oscar José Santucho's George Gordon, Lord Byron: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Secondary Materials in English, 1807-1974, with A Critical Review of Research (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1977). Together these form the most impressive and exhaustive record of the critical responses to and commentary on Byron since his first published appearance. It is difficult to do justice to such a magisterial project. The first part of the earlier volume provided a detailed survey of the criticism of and attitudes towards Byron's works from 1807, through the 19th century and the first half of the 20th up until 1974. Hence such crucial reactions as Carlyle's or Arnold's in the 19th, and Eliot's in the 20th century were documented, as were such landmark studies as M.K. Joseph's Byron the Poet (1964), Robert Gleckner's Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (1967), Jerome McGann's Fiery Dust (1968) and Michael Cooke's The Blind Man Traces the Circle (1969). So too were the great Coleridge and Prothero edition of Byron's Works (1898-1904), the seminal three-volume biography of Byron by Leslie Marchand (Byron. A Biography , 1957) and the works of other great Byron scholars such as Doris Langley Moore (The Late Lord Byron , 1961; Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered , 1974) and Malcolm Elwin (Lord Byron's Wife , 1962; The Noels and the Milbankes , 1968; Lord Byron's Family , 1975). However, since that time, there has been a considerable growth in Byron scholarship, and the canon itself has undergone a fundamental revision leading to new and definitive editions of his texts: Leslie Marchand's thirteen-volume edition of Byron's Letters and Journals (1973-94), Jerome McGann's seven-volume edition of Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works (1980-93) and my edition of Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose (1991). In addition, since 1985 Garland Publishing has been steadily producing Facsimile editions of Byron's manuscript poetry (original drafts and fair copies) in their Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics series under the general editorship of Donald H. Reiman, with an array of editors, amongst the most recent of whom Peter Cochran (Lord Byron XIII: The Prisoner of Chillon and Don Juan, Canto IX , 1995) and Cheryl Fallon Giuliano (Lord Byron XI: Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte and Don Juan Canto VIII and Stanzas from III and IX , 1997) deserve special mention. Moreover, the criticism of Byron has matured and taken a decidedly enlightened and more positive turn over the last twenty years, responding with vigour and sophistication to the various schools of critical thought (gender studies, feminism, Orientalism, historicism, psychoanalysis), and to the social and philosophical theories of, for instance, Foucault, Bakhtin, Derrida, Ricoeur, Blanchot, Baudrillard and Said. Again the work of McGann has been a formative influence in opening up this rich field of investigation and revaluation, as has that of Bernard Beatty, Drummond Bone, Malcolm Kelsall, and Frederick Beaty (Byron the Satirist , 1985), Peter Graham (Don Juan and Regency England , 1990), Caroline Franklin (Byron's Heroines , 1992), Richard Lansdown (Byron's Historical Dramas , 1992), Jerome Christensen (Lord Byron's Strength , 1993), Andrew Elfenbein (Byron and the Victorians , 1995), James Soderholm (Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend , 1996) and Moyra Haslett (Byron's Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend , 1998) - to name but some of the most distinguished of recent studies. To these must now be added Professor …