Alice Levine (editor): Byron's Poetry and Prose

The critical edition presented here is extraordinary already in that sense that it is a critical edition with all the characteristics a critical edition should have to a very, very reasonable price.

The book contains first a large selection of Byron's works, namely a selection of his poetry, the full texts of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Giaour, The Prison of Chillon, Manfred, Beppo and The Vision of Judgement. It also contains parts of Don Juan which I personally would have loved to see included complete, but I suppose this wasn't possible because of the limited space a one volume book has. The selection of poetry is in my opinion a very reasonable one including not only such typical Byron texts like She walks in Beauty, but also the satiric English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and early poems like I would I were a careless child, which I personally think is very beautiful, and of course a lot more.

The texts are presented with an introduction explaining the background of each text and there are footnotes explaining certain words or metaphors. This is on one hand very useful because you have the notes right there when you are reading, on the other hand it sometimes disturbs the reader as there are quite a lot of footnotes. I would also question the necessity of some of the footnotes because for example that Andalusia is in the south of Spain is  quite well known and not really necessary to be put into a footnote. On the other hand this may be known to me because Spain is geographically rather near and in other parts of the world - Alice Levine is a professor at a New York university - that may not be quite so obvious.

There is also, as should be in a critical edition, a large part dedicated to Byron's letters and journals. What is a very positive aspect here is not only the variety of letters, but also the notes and suggestions for further reading which are very helpful. 

Then there is of course the criticism. The most interesting part for me was the 19th century criticism which includes letters to Byron and among other writers. There are also reviews in literary journals included and this is very interesting, because it shows the diverse opinions on Byron of his contemporaries.

The 20th century and recent criticism is not quite as obvious to me. There is a number of very interesting articles included for example The sublime self and the inner voice by Peter J. Manning or The Orientalism of Byron's Giaour by Marilyn Butler, but it isn't clear why those articles are chosen. This is my only real critique: that I don't know why they did what thy did.

The register and the bibliography are all right, but I didn't go into them in detail.

Summed up a well made book and worth reading.