This book proposes a fresh and original interpretation of Keats' use of classical mythology in his verse. Dr Aske argues that classical antiquity appears to Keats as a supreme fiction, authoritative yet disconcerting, and his poems represent hard endeavours to come to terms with the influence of that fiction. The major poems (most notably Endymion, Hyperion, the Ode on a Grecian Urn and Lamia) form a stage, as it were, upon which is played out a psychic drama between the modern poet and his classical muse. The study is especially bold in its assimilation of historical scholarship and literary theory to a close reading of the texts. Individual poems are discussed in the context of late Enlightenment and Romantic attitudes towards antiquity and in the light of recent critical theory, in particular the theory of literary history and influence formulated by Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman. Keats emerges as a significant example of the way in which a poet tries to establish a distinct identity under the burden of history and of literary tradition.

This new edition of The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism has been fully revised and updated and includes two wholly new essays, one on recent developments in the field, and one on the rapidly expanding publishing industry of this period. It also features a comprehensive chronology and a fully up-to-date guide to further reading. For the past decade and more the Companion has been a much-admired and widely-used account of the phenomenon of British Romanticism that has inspired students to look at Romantic literature from a variety of critical angles and approaches. In this new incarnation, the volume will continue to be a standard guide for students of Romantic literature and its contexts.

Traditionally Hellenism is seen as the uncontroversial and beneficial influence of Greece upon later culture. Drawing upon new ideas from culture and gender theory, Jennifer Wallace rethinks the nature of classical influence and finds that the relationship between the modern west and Greece is one of anxiety, fascination and resistance. Shelley's protean and radical writing questions and illuminates the contemporary Romantic understanding of Greece. This book will appeal to students of Romantic Literature, as well as to those interested in the classical tradition.

This book surveys the poetic endeavour of John Keats and urges that his true poetry is uniquely constituted by being uttered through three artificial masks, rather than through the natural voice of his quotidian self. The first mask is formed by the attitudes and reality that ensue from aconscious commitment to the identity of poet as such. The second, called here the Mask of Camelot, takes shape from Keats's acceptance and compelling use of the vogue for medieval imaginings that was sweeping across Europe in his time. The third, the Mask of Hellas, eventuated from Keats'senthusiastic immersion in the rising tide of Romantic Hellenism. Keats's great achievement, the book argues, can only be ascertained by means of a resuscitation of the defunct critical category of 'genius', as that informs his use of the masks. To validate this category, the volume is concernedthroughout with the necessity of discriminating the truly poetic from the meretricious in Keats's endeavour. The Masks of Keats thus constitutes a criticism of and a rebuke to the deconstructive approach, which must treat all texts as equal and must entirely forego the conception of quality.

Oscar Wilde's imagination was haunted by ancient Greece; this book traces its presence in his life and works.

John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats's intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.The book re-examines some of Keats's most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats's poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time.