Byron's Othered Self and Voice

The Author: Abigail F. Keegan is Associate Professor of English and Women's Literature at Oklahoma City University. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Oklahoma. In addition to essays on American and British writers and numerous poems, she has published two books of poetry, The Feast of the Assumptions and Oklahoma Journey.

"In this lively and incisive work, Keegan studies the political and psychological conditions that inform Byron's poetry. 'Byron's Othered Self and Voice' combines exquisite close readings of individual poems with careful analysis of literary, cultural, historical, and biographical contexts that are crucial to the understanding of his writing. In focusing on the figure of the sodomite and on the ways Byron's poetry makes reference to the contemporary treatment of this figure, Keegan has made an important contribution to the study of Romanticism, gender, and sexuality." (Daniel Cottom, David Burr Chair of Letters, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma)
"Dr. Keegan has given a great gift to Byron and rendered an important service to popular culture scholars in her dazzling act of literary historical recovery: George Gordon was the popular culture super star of his time, as publicly adored, privately debauched, and personally anguished as Elvis Presley. Her brilliant recuperation of the Vere Street Massacre, a horrific occasion of social repression with consequences surpassing those of the Salem Witch Trials and the Stonewall Riots, and connecting that event to Byron's writing of the Oriental Tales, legal texts, and popular culture ephemera will give delighted readers new insights and information about the history and culture of male (homo)sexuality, Byron's place in that history, and that history's role in the creation of his much mythologized but heretofore incompletely understood Byronic hero." (Susan Koppelman, Editor of 'The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness' and 'Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers')