Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- General analytical and historical introduction
- PART I
- 1 Milton and Byron
- 2 Byron, mobility, and the poetics of historical ventriloquism
- 3 “My brain is feminine”: Byron and the poetry of deception
- 4 What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?
- 5 Byron and the anonymous lyric
- 6 Private poetry, public deception
- 7 Hero with a thousand faces: the rhetoric of Byronism
- 8 Byron and the lyric of sensibility
- 9 Byron and Wordsworth
- PART II
- Subject index
- Authors index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
4 - What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- General analytical and historical introduction
- PART I
- 1 Milton and Byron
- 2 Byron, mobility, and the poetics of historical ventriloquism
- 3 “My brain is feminine”: Byron and the poetry of deception
- 4 What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?
- 5 Byron and the anonymous lyric
- 6 Private poetry, public deception
- 7 Hero with a thousand faces: the rhetoric of Byronism
- 8 Byron and the lyric of sensibility
- 9 Byron and Wordsworth
- PART II
- Subject index
- Authors index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Framed in this way, the question is open to any number of responses: for the “interpreter,” the critic, is entirely free to decide which material in the literary event shall be salient for interpretation. The “circumstances of publication,” therefore, can make a big difference, or no difference at all, or they can make various kinds of intermediate differences that could be specified.
I do not say this to be sophistical, but to call attention to some of the critical assumptions which generated the question. The question assumes that “circumstances of publication” make a difference to interpretation, and that such a difference has been demonstrated in certain critical discussions, perhaps in some of the work that I myself have done. But the question is aware that these demonstrations create a theoretical problem for some of the most important governing protocols of our received critical ideas: for instance, that bibliography and interpretation are different modes of literary enquiry and do not (as it were) naturally correspond with each other; that the social (as opposed to the purely authorial) dimensions of textual events have no necessary or essential relation to literary meaning; in general, that hermeneutics must preserve a theoretical (as opposed to an heuristic) distinction between the “extrinsic” and the “intrinsic” in literary study.
I disagree with these three ideas. Indeed, my own assumptions – the frames of my critical practice – are in each case precisely the inverse of each one.
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- Information
- Byron and Romanticism , pp. 77 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002