In this book White "traces the influence of both the comedies and tragedies {of Shakespeare} on Keats's work." (Choice)

The Great William is the first book to explore how seven renowned writers—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes—wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were reading his work. What emerges is a constellation of remarkable intellectual and emotional encounters. Theodore Leinwand builds impressively detailed accounts of these writers’ experiences through their marginalia, lectures, letters, journals, and reading notes. We learn why Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby, and what Ginsberg meant when referring to the mouth feel of Shakespeare’s verse. From Hughes’s attempts to find a “skeleton key” to all of Shakespeare’s plays to Berryman’s tormented efforts to edit King Lear, Leinwand reveals the palpable energy and conviction with which these seven writers engaged with Shakespeare, their moments of utter self-confidence and profound vexation. In uncovering these intense public and private reactions, The Great William connects major writers’ hitherto unremarked scenes of reading Shakespeare with our own.

The daringly imagined, masterfully realized story of poet John Keats's second life abroad. What if John Keats had not died in Rome at twenty-five, just as he was coming to realize his gifts? In this audaciously imagined alternate life story, the young poet is pulled back from the brink of death only to find his troubles far from over. He is short on money, far from home, his literary reputation anything but assured—but his life and imagination have been spared, and a new country awaits. In an Italy at uneasy peace, full of foreign armies and spies, Keats soon finds his loyalties divided. He is drawn into Percy and Mary Shelley’s expatriate circle, resumes his old profession of surgery and falls in with student revolutionaries who are plotting a more radical cure for their nation. His fiancée in London expects his return, and everyone is expecting his next poem, but he has not returned from his deathbed quite the same person—or poet—that he was. Written with erudition and compassion, Paul Kerschen’s debut novel is a spellbinding historical yarn and a heady engagement with the literature of the past, a thing of beauty in itself and a meditation on the writer’s duty in troubled times. “An ambitious, thrilling work of the imagination... The Warm South is so much: a love story, a historical thriller, a great literary what-if, and a profound meditation on the act of creation itself.” DANIEL MASON, New York Times bestselling author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner “A lyrical and profound exploration of mortality, second chances, art, and ambition. Kerschen writes an alternate history for the beloved poet Keats, allowing him to rise from an early deathbed and experience the gory operating theaters of Pisa, the decadence of Italian Carnival, and a seductive and sometimes dangerous entanglement with Mary and Percy Shelley. Written with elegance and heart, The Warm South pulses with life.” FRANCES DE PONTES PEEBLES, author of The Air You Breathe and The Seamstress “Paul Kerschen’s miraculous first novel grants the poet John Keats an extended life in Italy as the surgeon he trained to be, and as the husband and father he never became. Superbly imagined, impeccably written, uncanny in its intimacy with Keats’s mind and feelings, this book also conjures the Italy in which Keats lived and died—and here lives on. Kerschen brings this mate- rial astonishingly alive and close. This is the best novel I’ve read all year.” CARTER SCHOLZ, author of Gypsy and Radiance “The Warm South offers an alternate biography, a second chance—a daring and deeply imagined portrait of genius made more human, more accessible, and more moving and vital than any history or scholarship can allow.” VU TRAN, author of Dragonfish “A bold strike. Kerschen applies SF’s classic ‘what if’ to literature itself. And like stern Mary Shelley’s monster, the dead poet stirs, and rises, and walks. But the path between the old world and his new friends is steep... Come.” TERRY BISSON, author of Any Day Now and Bears Discover Fire

Who were Shakespeare's first readers and what did they think of his works? Offering the first dedicated account of the ways in which Shakespeare's texts were read in the centuries during which they were originally produced, Jean-Christophe Mayer reconsiders the role of readers in the history of Shakespeare's rise to fame and in the history of canon formation. Addressing an essential formative 'moment' when Shakespeare became a literary dramatist, this book explores six crucial fields: literacy; reading and life-writing; editing Shakespeare's text; marking Shakespeare for the theatre; commonplacing; and passing judgement. Through close examination of rare material, some of which has never been published before, and covering both the marks left by readers in their books and early manuscript extracts of Shakespeare, Mayer demonstrates how the worlds of print and performance overlapped at a time when Shakespeare offered a communal text, the ownership of which was essentially undecided.

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of William Hazlitt, John Keats and Charles Lamb to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.

At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the context of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death.

This beautiful, giftable collection celebrates the beauty and the agony of love through classic poems, stories, and letters from beloved writers. Because it defines human existence, love is one of art’s favorite subjects. Timeless Love: Poems, Stories, and Letters celebrates the mysterious nature of love and passion by bringing together classic works by beloved writers through the ages. Including stories, poems, and letters from Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barret Browning, John Keats, Edith Wharton, and more, this collection explores how each love is singular—yet love itself is universal. Hand-selected and presented in a lovely, gift-worthy package, Timeless Love will make a romantic, thoughtful gift for the reader in your life or the perfect addition to a collector’s shelf.