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A preeminent critic maps the frontier of contemporary poetry. In this book, Jerome McGann argues that contemporary language-oriented writing implies a marked change in the way we think about our poetic tradition on one hand and in the future of criticism on the other. He focuses on Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein as important intellectual resources because both see the history of poetry as a crisis of the present rather than as a legacy of the past. The crisis appears as a poetic deficit in contemporary culture, where values of politics and morality are judged prima facie more important than aesthetic values. McGann argues for the fundamental relevance of the aesthetic dimension and the contemporary relevance of cultural works of the past. McGann moves through several broad categories in his examination of contemporary poetry, including the ways in which poetry must be abstract, change, and give pleasure. The author draws on sources ranging from the poetry of Bruce Andrews and Robert Duncan to Looney Tunes cartoons. The experimental move in contemporary poetry, McGann contends, is an emergency signal for readers and critics as much as it is for writers and poets, a signal that calls us to rethink the aesthetics of criticism. The interpretation of literary works has been dominated by enlightenment models—the expository essay and monograph—for almost two hundred years. With the emergence of new media, especially digital culture, the limitations of those models have grown increasingly apparent. The Point Is To Change It explores alternative critical methods and provides a powerful call to reinvent our modes of investigation in order to escape the limitations of our inherited academic models. The goal of this process is to widen existing cracks or create new ones because, as McGann points out via the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, "That's how the light gets in."

Jerome McGann's manifesto argues that the history of texts and how they are preserved and accessed for interpretation are the overriding subjects of humanist study in the digital age. Theory and philosophy no longer suffice as an intellectual framework. But philology--out of fashion for decades--models these concerns with surprising fidelity.

This 2002 collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by one of the most important critics of Romanticism and Byron studies, Jerome McGann. The collection demonstrates McGann's evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian. His 'General Analytic and Historical Introduction' to the collection presents a meditation on the history of his own research on Byron, in particular how scholarly editing interacted with the theoretical innovations in literary criticism over the last quarter of the twentieth century. McGann's receptiveness to dialogic forms of criticism is also illustrated in this collection, which contains an interview and concludes with a dialogue between McGann and the editor. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now McGann's influential work on Byron can be appreciated more widely by new generations of students and scholars.

A major poet, writer, and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was seen as the dominating cultural presence in the second half of the nineteenth century. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite movement, revised and reimagined Blake's project of marrying images and texts, and was a shaping influence on Modernist aesthetic ideas and practices. His translations are original poetical works in their own right.Jerome McGann, a leading figure in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, presents a generous selection of Rossetti's poetry, prose, and original translations. The collection, which includes important writings unavailable in any edition of Rossetti ever printed, is accompanied by McGann's learned and critically incisive commentaries and notes.

Sarah Emily Davies (1830-1921) lived and crusaded during a time of profound change for education and women's rights in England. At the time of her birth, women's suffrage was scarcely open to discussion, and not one of England's universities (there were four) admitted women. By the time of her death, not only had the number of universities grown to twelve, all of which were open to women; women had also begun to get the vote. Davies's own activism in the women's movement and in the social and educational reform movements of the time culminated in her founding of Girton College, Cambridge University, the first residential college of higher education for women. Much of the social change that Davies witnessed-and helped to effect-was discussed, encouraged, and elicited through her personal correspondence. These letters, written to friends, allies, and potential supporters during the years of Davies's greatest political and social activity, reveal the evolution of her skill and sophistication as an activist. They also show the development of women's suffrage, education, and journalism movements from a group of loosely affiliated like-minded friends to an astute and organized political network of reformers. In these letters-most of which have never been published-we see Davies struggle to understand and theorize about the role of women, cajole and encourage potential supporters, explore complexities of various reform movements, and demonstrate her formidable attention to detail in inventing and constructing an imaginable new institution. Her intensely engaged life placed Davies at the very heart of the events that transformed her era. Ann B. Murphy is Associate Professor of English at Assumption College. Deirdre Raftery, Lecturer in Education at University College Dublin, is the author of Emily Davies:Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600-1900. Victorian Literature and Culture Series