ABSTRACT
Byrons engagement with party politics is liberal, perhaps admirable, but not unusually radical. For Byrons editor, Jerome McGann, Byrons cultural re-emergence in the late twentieth century is an historical fate. McGann focuses more on the American academy, and the power struggles there. Politics becomes more relevant when it takes up issues that matter generally rather than those traditionally belonging to the interests serving particular political parties views of society. The expansion of political relevance in Byrons age was not the blanket assumption that critical approval and disapproval depended on the politics of reviewer and reviewed, the neglect of actual literary merit explaining William Giffords motives in trying to discredit William Hazlitts work. Byrons involvement with the Morning Chronicle, early and late, and his awareness of the diversification of contemporary print culture, vie or sit uncomfortably with his role as an aristocrat of letters.
