Jane Stabler. Byron, Poetics and History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. ISBN: 0521812410. Price: US$70.00.

Given the prominence of historicist methodologies in Romantic studies over the past twenty or so years, and given the tendency of such work to underscore prominently the political implications of nearly every aspect of Romantic culture, it would hardly seem surprising to see a study on “Byron, Politics, and History.” The way for such a study would have been paved by the now familiar pantheon of 1980s historicist scholarship by such critics as David Simpson, Marjorie Levinson, and Marilyn Butler, but perhaps most thoroughly and most profoundly by Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology and in his magisterial new Oxford edition of Byron’s works that began to appear in that decade. Indeed, such a title, “Byron, Politics, and History,” might serve as a fitting subtitle to all of McGann’s work on Byron. But alas, while one could be forgiven for mistaking it as such with a quick glance, “Byron, Politics and History” is not the title of Jane Stabler’s recent monograph on Byron. Her title, rather, is Byron, Poetics and History, and in the shift from politics to poetics, Stabler’s work might be considered as indicative of recent critical trends that return to poetic form, but form here conceived as responsive to and contingent upon historical context—an emphasis seen also in the work of Stuart Curran, Susan Wolfson, and others. Byron claimed famously that he wrote “what’s uppermost, without delay” (Don Juan, xiv.7), and throughout her study, Stabler is most concerned with the way that this and similar moments constitute what she terms Byron’s “poetics of digression,” by which she means to characterize Byron’s tendency to sway from the thread of his narrative or argument in reference to other texts or contextual events through parenthetical asides, passing allusion, and explicit quotation. Such moves recur throughout Byron’s work and were noted even by his earliest critics. The abruptness and discontinuity of these digressions, in Stabler’s account, complicate the reading experience by making the reader aware of other routes, other interpretations and hence while Byron’s work produces a rich intertextuality, it also produces an often puzzling indeterminacy. Stabler, however, does not want to resolve such moments, nor does she wish to claim that they invite infinite unresolvability. Rather, for her, they point to a middle ground, to what we might call an ethics of reading where the reader must cast a deciding vote in what Jerome McGann has characterized as Don Juan’s “procedural rule of ‘both/and.’” This represents a possibility with which some critics might be uncomfortable, and indeed, Stabler argues that the discontinuity of Byronic digression is insufficiently recognized due to critical attempts to fix meaning as part of a larger system. In her call for a return of critical attention to poetics and the formal qualities of Romantic verse, Stabler is critical of accounts of Byron’s work, like that of McGann, that unify his style under a particular philosophical or moral ideal and of those that, like Jerome Christensen in her reading, resort to a more general conception of the whole of Byron’s work. Such accounts, according to Stabler, tend to “regulate Byron’s digressions and to systematize the strange conjunctions of violence and polish in his poetics” (14), and thus they sacrifice what she terms “the particularity of the reading experience” (5). Instead of producing a general theory of Byron, or even a survey of his entire corpus, Stabler prefers to focus on local effects, on the contingent and the individual case, a move that she aligns with the rejection of wholeness and totality in the work of such French feminists as Kristeva, Irigaray, and …