Victorian Keats

Victorian Keats
Author: J. Najarian
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2002-09-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230596851

This book explores the sexual implications of reading Keats. Keats was lambasted by critics throughout the nineteenth century for his sensuousness and his 'effeminacy'. The Victorians simultaneously identified with, imitated, and distrusted the 'unmanly' poet. Writers, among them Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and Wilfred Owen came to terms with Keats's work by creating out of the 'effeminate' poet a sexual and literary ally.

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era
Author: Andrew Radford
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351902474

In tracing those deliberate and accidental Romantic echoes that reverberate through the Victorian age into the beginning of the twentieth century, this collection acknowledges that the Victorians decided for themselves how to define what is 'Romantic'. The essays explore the extent to which Victorianism can be distinguished from its Romantic precursors, or whether it is possible to conceive of Romanticism without the influence of these Victorian definitions. Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era reassesses Romantic literature's immediate cultural and literary legacy in the late nineteenth century, showing how the Victorian writings of Matthew Arnold, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës, the Brownings, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and the Rossettis were instrumental in shaping Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon. Many of these Victorian writers found in the biographical, literary, and historical models of Chatterton, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth touchstones for reappraising their own creative potential and artistic identity. Whether the Victorians affirmed or revolted against the Romanticism of their early years, their attitudes towards Romantic values enriched and intensified the personal, creative, and social dilemmas described in their art. Taken together, the essays in this collection reflect on current critical dialogues about literary periodisation and contribute to our understanding of how these contemporary debates stem from Romanticism's inception in the Victorian age.

Keats

Keats
Author: Andrew Motion
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 702
Release: 1999-04-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780226542409

Andrew Motion's dramatic narration of Keats's life is the first in a generation to take a fresh look at this great English Romantic poet. Unlike previous biographers, Motion pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited. Making incisive use of the poet's inimitable letters, Motion presents a masterful account. "Motion has given us a new Keats, one who is skinned alive, a genius who wrote in a single month all the poems we cherish, a victim who was tormented by the best doctors of the age. . . . This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to glowing colours, should last us for another generation."—Edmund White, The Observer Review "Keats's letters fairly leap off the page. . . . [Motion] listens for the 'freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash,' the 'headlong charge,' of Keats's jazzlike improvisations, which give us, like no other writing in English, the actual rush of a man thinking, a mind hurtling forward unpredictably and sweeping us along."—Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review "Scrupulous and eloquent."—Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer

Keats and History

Keats and History
Author: Nicholas Roe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1995-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521442459

The poems of John Keats have traditionally been regarded as most resistant of all Romantic poetry to the concerns of history and politics. But critical trends have begun to overturn this assumption. Keats and History brings together exciting work by British and American scholars, in thirteen essays which respond to interest in the historical dimensions of Keats's poems and letters, and open alternative perspectives on his achievement. Keats's writings are approached through politics, social history, feminism, economics, historiography, stylistics, aesthetics, and mathematical theory. The editor's introduction places the volume in relation to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readings of the poet. Keats and History will be welcomed by students of English literature, and by all those interested in English Romanticism.

Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle

Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004489215

Both John Keats and Thomas Carlyle were born in 1795, but one rarely thinks of them together. When one does, curious speculations result. It is difficult to think of Carlyle as a young Romantic or of Keats as a Victorian Sage, but had Carlyle died prematurely and had Keats lived to a ripe old age, we might now be considering a Romantic Carlyle and a Victorian Keats. Such a juxtaposition leads one to consider the use and abuse, the fusions and confusions, of period terms in literary history and in criticism. Does Carlyle represent Romanticism as typically as Keats? Does Keats's work give us any cause to believe that he might have developed into a Victorian poet? Do the terms Romanticism and Victorian have any useful literary historical and literary critical value? What are the marks of the transition from one to the other? Or is the existence of such a transition an illusion? In this volume, some essays consider aspects of Keats or of Carlyle independently, or together, or focus on contemporaries of one or other or of both and explore the effect of their literary and ideological relationships, and the often indefinable sense that we all have of different styles, manners and periods, as well as the awareness that we might all be equally deceived about such distinctive boundaries and definitions.

What the Victorians Made of Romanticism

What the Victorians Made of Romanticism
Author: Tom Mole
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691202923

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

Milton and the Victorians

Milton and the Victorians
Author: Erik Gray
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2011-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0801457416

The Victorian period was a golden age for the study of Milton. Yet the influence of Milton on poetry, and on literature more generally, during the period is often obscure. Victorian writers rarely display the overt, self-conscious engagement with Milton that typified so much Romantic writing earlier in the nineteenth century. In Milton and the Victorians Erik Gray argues that this shift represents not a breach but an expansion: if Milton's influence seems less remarkable than before, it is due not to his absence but to his pervasiveness. Through detailed consideration of works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot, Gray shows how Victorian writers tended to draw upon the less sublime, more understated elements of Milton's writings. In tracing the characteristically oblique influence of Milton on Victorian authors, Gray also draws attention to important aspects of Milton's own work, notably the way it often depicts power being exerted indirectly. Gray thus proposes new and nuanced models of literary relations, while offering original and elegant readings both of Milton's poetry and of major works of Victorian literature.

Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure

Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure
Author: Ayumi Mizukoshi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2016-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230285902

This book tackles the age-old interpretative problem of 'pleasure' in Keat's poetry by placing him in the context of the liberal, leisured and luxurious culture of Hunt's circle. Challenging the standard narrative which attribute Keat's astonishing poetic development to his separation from Hunt, the author cogently argues that Keats, profoundly imbued with Hunt's bourgeois ethic and aesthetic, remained a poet of sensuous pleasure through to the end of his short career.