This new study of Byron explores the 'geo-historical' - places where historically significant events have occurred. Cheeke examines the ways in which the notion of being there becomes the central claim and shaping force in Byron's poetry up to 1818. He goes on to explore the concept of being in-between which characterises Byron's 1818-21 poetry. Finally, Byron's complex nostalgia for England, his sense of having been there, is read in relation to a broader critique of memory, home-sickness and place-attachment.

Writing for art is a concise introduction to the subject of ekphrasis, and the first study to offer a useful general survey of the larger philosophical and theoretical questions arising from the encounter of literary texts and artworks. Stephen Cheeke offers close readings of poems and prose from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alongside a generous amount of illustrations, covering a broad range of writing and theory about the relation of literary texts to the visual arts, and extending the subject of ekphrasis to include literary works on photography, as well as celebrated prose...

Transfiguration explores the work of John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Walter Pater, treating in particular the ways in which they engaged with the Christian content of their subject, and, in Pater's case, how the art of Christianity was contrasted with classical sculpture. Stephen Cheeke examines two related phenomena: idolatry (a false substitution, a sexual betrayal), and the poetics of transfiguration (to elevate or glorify subject matter not thought of as conventionally poetic, to praise). Central to the book is the question of the "translation" of...