Keats and Scepticism explores Keats’s affinity with the philosophical tradition of scepticism and reads Keats’s poetry anew in the light of this affinity. It suggests Keats’s links with the origin of scepticism in ancient Greece as recorded in Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism. It also discusses Keats’s connections with Montaigne, the most important Renaissance inheritor of Pyrrhonian scepticism; Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosophe whose sceptical ideas made an indelible impact on Keats; and Hume, the most thoroughgoing sceptic after antiquity. Other than Keats’s affinitive ideas with these sceptical thinkers, this book is particularly interested in Keats’s experiments with the peculiar language, forms, modes, and genres of poetry to convey the non-dogmatic philosophy. In this light, it re-reads Isabella, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, the 1819 odes, the two Hyperions, King Stephen, and Lamia, all of which reveal Keats’s self-reflexive and radical sceptical poetics in challenging poetic dogmas and conventions. This book is for Keats lovers, students, teachers, scholars, or non-academic readers who are interested in Romanticism, nineteenth-century studies, or poetry and philosophy in general. This original, accessible interdisciplinary study aims to offer the reader a fresh perspective to read Keats and appreciate the quintessential Keatsian poetics.

John Keats (1795–1821) continues to delight and challenge readers both within and beyond the academic community through his poems and letters. This volume provides frameworks for enhanced analysis and appreciation of Keats and his work, with each chapter supplying a succinct, informed, and accessible account of a particular topic. Leading scholars examine the life and work of Keats against the backdrop of his influences, contemporaries, and reception, and explore the interaction of poet and world. The essays consider his enduring but ever-altering appeal, engage with critical discussion and debate, and offer revisionary close reading of the poems and letters. Students and specialists will find their knowledge of Keats's life and work enriched by chapters that survey subjects ranging from education, relationships, and religion to art, genre, and film.

"Negative capability", the term John Keats used only once in a letter to his brothers, is a well-known but surprisingly unexplored concept in literary criticism and aesthetics. This book is the first book-length study of this central concept in seventy years. As well as clarifying the meaning of the term and giving an anatomy of its key components, the book gives a full account of the history of this idea. It traces the narrative of how the phrase first became known and gradually gained currency, and explores its primary sources in earlier writers, principally Shakespeare and William Hazlitt, and its chief Modernist successors, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Meanwhile, the term is also applied to Keats's own poetry, which manifests the evolution of the idea in Keats's poetic practice. Many of the comparative readings of the relevant texts, including King Lear, illuminate the interconnections between these major writers. The book is an original and significant piece of scholarship on this celebrated concept.

The Book, Female Voices In Keats'S Poetry Studies Some Major Women Figures In John Keats'S Poetry In The Light Of Recent Criticism Of Sexual Ambiguity In Keats. Sexual Ambiguity, As Scholars Have Discussed, Refers To The Sexual Identity Or Fragmented Poetic Self As Reflected In John Keats'S Verse. It Examines Some Central Women Characters Of Keatsian Verse In The Light Of This Dual Strand: First, As To How Far These Women Figures Are Projections Of Keats'S Own Poetic Self; And Secondly, What Do They Reveal, As Regards Attitudes Of A Male Poet Towards Women. A Study Of These Women Figures Provides Interesting Observations On Feminine Projections Besides Trying To Correlate The Shaping Of These Attitudes With The Psychological And Biographical Strands Of The Poet'S Life. The Study Of Keatsian Verse Complicates The Issue Of Gender, Has Already Been Highlighted By Recent Criticism. The Book Examines The Female Characters In His Poetry In The Light Of Deeper Conflicts, Complexities And Confusions Within Keats'S Own Poetic Self.

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.

This book examines certain literary works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron, and John Keats because, on the one hand, they represent patriarchal hegemony and, on the other, they present a challenge to it. The primary objective of the book is to demonstrate that despite their tendency towards liberty, individual rights, and imagination, these poets did not consistently choose one attitude towards women in their literary works. Suggesting that Byron, Shelley and Keats were caught between their liberal views on women and patriarchal norms of their age, the book discusses how their attitudes towards women lack consistency through an analysis of the specific roles assigned to women, both in accordance with and in defiance of traditional gender norms.

Beginning with a reassessment of contemporary romantic studies, this book provides a modern critical comparison of Keats and Shelley. The study offers detailed close readings of a variety of literary genres (including the romance, lyric, elegy and literary fragment) adopted by Keats and Shelley to explore their poetic treatment of self and form. The poetic careers of Keats and Shelley embrace a tragic affirmation of those darker elements latent in the earlier writings to meditate on their own posthumous reception and reputation. Fresh readings of Keats and Shelley show how they conceive of the self as fictional and anticipate Nietzsche's modern theories of subjectivity. Nietzsche's conception of the subject as a site of conflicting fictions usefully measures this emergent sense of poetic self and form in Keats and Shelley. This Nietzschean perspective enriches our appreciation of the considerable artistic achievement of these two significant second-generation romantic poets.