Since the early nineteenth century, Byron, the man and his image, have captured the hearts and minds of untold legions of people of all political and social stripes in Britain, Europe, America, and around the world. This book focuses on the history and cultural significance for Federal America of the only portrait of Byron known to have been painted by a major artist. In private hands from 1826 until this day, Thomas Sully's Byron has never before been the subject of scholarly study. Beginning with his discovery of the portrait in 1999 and a 200-year narrative of the portrait's provenance and its relation to other well-known Byron portraits, the author discusses the work within the broad context of British and American portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Receiving most attention are Thomas Lawrence and Sully, his American counterpart. The author gives the fullest account to date of Sully's career and his relation to English influences and to figures prominent in the early-nineteenth-century American imagination, among them, Washington, Fanny Kemble, Lafayette, Joseph Bonaparte, and Nicholas Biddle. Byron is discussed as an icon of the young American Republic whose Jubilee year coincided with Sully's initial work on the poet's portrait. Later chapters offer a close reading of the portrait, arguing that Sully has given a visual interpretation truly worthy of his celebrated, controversial, and famously handsome subject.

This set reissues 7 books on the Romantic poet Lord Byron originally published between 1957 and 2005. The volumes examine Byron’s poetry, his poetic development, and his social and private life. Lord Byron’s epic satiric poem Don Juan is examined by some of the leading scholars of Romanticism.

One of this century's leading evolutionary biologists, Motoo Kimura revolutionized the field with his random drift theory of molecular evolution—the neutral theory—and his groundbreaking theoretical work in population genetics. This volume collects 57 of Kimura's most important papers and covers forty years of his diverse and original contributions to our understanding of how genetic variation affects evolutionary change. Kimura's neutral theory, first presented in 1968, challenged the notion that natural selection was the sole directive force in evolution. Arguing that mutations and random drift account for variations at the level of DNA and amino acids, Kimura advanced a theory of evolutionary change that was strongly challenged at first and that eventually earned the respect and interest of evolutionary biologists throughout the world. This volume includes the seminal papers on the neutral theory, as well as many others that cover such topics as population structure, variable selection intensity, the genetics of quantitative characters, inbreeding systems, and reversibility of changes by random drift. Background essays by Naoyuki Takahata examine Kimura's work in relation to its effects and recent developments in each area.

Fifteen families.Four hundred years. The complex saga of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in America’s history. For decades, writers from Cleveland Amory to Joseph Alsop to the editors of Politico have proclaimed the diminishment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who for generations were the dominant socio-cultural-political force in America. While the WASP elite has, in the last half century, indeed drifted from American centrality to the periphery, its relevance and impact remain, as Michael Gross reveals in his compelling chronicle. From Colonial America’s founding settlements through the Gilded Age to the present day, Gross traces the complex legacy of American WASPs—their profound accomplishments and egregious failures—through the lives of fifteen influential individuals and their very privileged, sometimes intermarried families. As the Bradford, Randolph, Morris, Biddle, Sanford, Peabody and Whitney clans progress, prosper and periodically stumble, defining aspects in the four-century sweep of American history emerge: our wide, oft-contentious religious diversity; the deep scars of slavery, genocide, and intolerance; the creation and sometime mis-use of astonishing economic and political power; an enduring belief in the future; an instinct to offset inequity with philanthropy; an equal capacity for irresponsible, sometimes wanton, behavior. “American society was supposed to be different,” writes Gross, “but for most of our history we have had a patriciate, an aristocracy, a hereditary oligarchic upper class, who initiated the American national experiment.” In previous acclaimed books such as 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery, Gross has explored elite culture in microcosm; expanding the canvas, Flight of the WASP chronicles it across four centuries and fifteen generations in an ambitious and consequential contribution to American history.

The fame of the Romantic poet Lord Byron rests not only on his work but also on the way he looked and the way he was portrayed during his lifetime and after his death. Originating in a conference held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, this is the first collection of papers to be published on the visual aspects of Byron and Romanticism. Topics explored include Byron's relations with the artists who portrayed him and those who commissioned portraits of him (including his publisher); his self-image and its expression in his work; the way in which his features were used in illustrations of the heroes of his poems; his role in early forms of modern celebrity visual culture such as prints, caricatures, medals, and other forms of memorabilia; the way he has been represented on screen; and his role as a political icon, Illustrated.

Fanny Kemble played a highly significant cultural role on both sides of the Atlantic. The life of this actress-turned-writer-turned-polemicist also intersects with a host of nineteenth-century figures.

Anglophiles and students of portraiture will find that The Royal Portrait fills a surprising void in the literature, as Scott (Royal Collection) presents for the first time a survey of British portraits housed in the various venues of the Royal Collection. The broad scope ranges from Richard II (the first British king portrayed) to Queen Elizabeth II; the latter monarch, along with Queen Victoria, is the subject of an independent chapter, while other chapters focus on images of royals from a particular dynastic house, such as the Stuart and the Hanoverian. Through an interesting selection of diverse media and formats employed in different periods, Scott explores the central question of "what constitutes a royal portrait?" The answers are multifaceted and contingent on such factors as patronage, function, royal control, and artistic intention; nevertheless symbolic visual conventions can still be traced in the representations of British monarchs over the centuries. This is a clearly written, well-illustrated survey; for more in-depth analyses of particular works one will need to turn to specialized sources, e.g., D. Howarth's Images of Rule (1997). Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers. General Readers; Lower-division Undergraduates; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by J. K. Dabbs.