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.

John Keats remains one of the most familiar and beloved of English poets, but has received surprisingly little critical attention in recent years. This study is a fresh contribution to Keats criticism and Romantic scholarship, positioning Keats as a figure of philosophical interest who warrants renewed attention. Exploring Keats’s own Romantic accounts of feeling and thinking, this study draws a connection between poetry and the phenomenological branches of modern philosophy. The study takes Keats’s poetic evocation of touching hands, wandering feet, beating hearts and breathing bodies as a descriptive elaboration of consciousness and a phenomenological account of experience. The philosophical terms of analysis adopted here challenge the orthodoxies of Keats scholarship, traditionally characterised by the careful historicisation of a limited canon. The philosophical framework of analysis enhances the readings put forward, while Keats’s poems, in turn, serve to give fuller expression of those ideas themselves. Using Keats as a particular case, this book also demonstrates the ways in which theory and philosophy supplement literary scholarship.

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.

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.