Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-521-45452-2 (hardback). Price: £35 (US$54.95) Donald A. Low, ed., Byron: Selected Poetry and Prose. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. ISBN: 0-415-07317-0 (paperback). Price: £10.99.

Since Pseudo-Marxist Romantic Studies long ago provided us with the noisy rehabilitation of the noted Tory, Robert Southey, we should be used to the little ironies of literary criticism. Byron never suffered similar neglect to Southey, but his popularity seems greater now than it has been for some time. After being rather self-consciously overlooked by the "Romanticisms" of the 1970s and 80s, Byron was perhaps the last of the 'major' poets of the period to receive re-evaluation. Some of the reasons for his re-emergence rely upon his very appeal to critics working in non-canonical areas. We may, therefore, be thankful for Byron, about whom it is still possible to write broadly appealing work while remaining trendy. Of course, Byron never really went away, and there is still a small culture industry based upon a very non-academic figure, who is perhaps not all that different from the 'Byron' created by industry-mongers in the years after his death. Nevertheless, renewed academic interest is based on several factors. Foremost in these is the production of an accurate scholarly edition by Jerome McGann which brings together all the poetry and compliments the work done earlier by Leslie Marchand on the letters and journals. For anyone who doubted it, there is now readily available evidence of a vast and extremely varied corpus of work which can, and indeed has, been incorporated into very varied studies by young critics. An older generation of writers, (McGann, Gleckner and Cooke) produced an interesting, if small, body of work, which has been added to by Jerome Christensen, Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning amongst others. Some of the renewed interest in Byron can be explained by reference to three particular areas of interest: Feminism; Orientalism and Drama. Both Wolfson and Caroline Franklin have written on women and gender in Byron's poetry; Nigel Leask and Frederick Garber have produced excellent work on the neglected Oriental Tales; and a number of chapters and essays have focused on the largely forgotten dramas, in particular a special edition of Studies in Romanticism dealing with Sardanapaulus , and including an important essay by Marilyn Butler. Furthermore, Byron has become the focus of a certain amount of new historicist interest dealing with the re-construction of the literary climate in which Byron was writing, and treating Byron as representative of the period, in contrast to other 'canonical' writing: for this both the work of McGann and Christensen has been significant. Since Byron has become 'hot property' once again, it is unsurprising that Routledge have chosen to include a selection in their Routledge English Texts . Donald Low, as the editor, follows the series practice in aiming at the large undergraduate market, and he intends presumably to rival his main opposition, McGann's Oxford Authors edition. Given McGann's fame, the selling power of OUP, and the fact that for a slightly greater price Oxford offer a text nearly three times as long, it looks like Routledge are in for some trouble. Low's editorial policy, furthermore, is somewhat ambiguous: he admits to both consulting early nineteenth century editions and those of McGann and Marchand. The policy taken by another recent edition, Wolfson and Manning's for Penguin was to revert to the Murray edition of 1832/3. This at least provides one with a clear indication of where the texts are coming from. Routledge presumably foresee little competition in their market from Penguin, who publish Don Juan separately, and ignore the prose. Instead, following Oxford there are selections from Byron's prose, including the very interesting speeches from the Lords, left out elsewhere; the Alpine Journal which is handy for students working on …