Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Introduction: North, South, East — and West; The Strangeness of ‘Debateable Lands’

   • Susan Oliver

   Pages 1-18

3. Collecting Ballads and Resisting Radical Energies: Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

   • Susan Oliver

   Pages 19-68

4. Scott’s Narrative Poetry: The Borders and the Highland Margins

   • Susan Oliver

   Pages 69-102

5. Crossing ‘Dark Barriers’: Byron, Europe and the Near East in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos 1 and 2

   • Susan Oliver

   Pages 103-155

6. Byron’s Eastern Tales: Eastern Themes and Contexts

   • Susan Oliver

   Pages 156-201

7. Back Matter

   Pages 202-241

   PDF

Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. The author discusses Scott's edited collection of Border Ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and his narrative poetry, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , cantos 1 and 2, his Eastern Tales, and his late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island. This fascinating study provides a detailed exegesis of the importance of borders to these leading poets and the public, during the early years of the Nineteenth-Century, with an emphasis on reciprocal literary influences, and on attitudes towards cultural instability.

• poem
• poetics
• poetry
• British and Irish Literature

Winner of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. For more information see the prize's website: http://www.britac.ac.uk/misc/medals/crawshay.html

'Susan Oliver has written a very fine book on the poetry of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron which puts to compelling use the concept of the border as a geographical, political and metaphorical site of 'Cultural encounter'...Oliver's chapters on Scott and Byron are written with a level of clarity, conviction and energy which makes them a pleasure to read.' - Paul M. Curtis, Romanticism

SUSAN OLIVER is a Senior Member of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge and Visiting Fellow at the University of Essex.  From September 2007 she will be Lecturer in Long-Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Salford, UK.