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.

For many readers, John Keats's achievement is to have attainted a supreme poetic maturity at so young an age. Canonical poems of resignation and acceptance such as 'To Autumn' are traditionally seen as examples par excellence of this maturity. In this highly innovative study, however, Marggraf Turley examines how, for Keats, an insistence on 'boyishness' in the midst of apparent mature imagery is the very essence of his political contestation of the literary establishment.

This book contains a collection of Keats' letters, written over four years. With extraordinary candour and self-knowledge he gives us his experience of almost everything that can happen to a young man between the ages of 21 and 25.

This study looks at the way writers in the Romantic period, both canonical and popular, attempted to situate themselves in relation to enthusiasm, frequently craving the idea of its therapeutic power, but often also seeking to distinguish their writing from what many regarded as its destructive and pathological power.

The first study to treat poetry of the Romantic period through the motif of prayer, it covers a range of canonical writers to illustrate how prayer is central to literature's engagement with a secular age.

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.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This fourth volume, and second to appear in the series, covers the years 1790-1880 and explores romantic and Victorian receptions of the classics. Noting the changing fortunes of particular classical authors and the influence of developments in archaeology, aesthetics and education, it traces the interplay between classical and nineteenth-century perceptions of gender, class, religion, and the politics of republic and empire in chapters engaging with many of the major writers of this period.

This ground-breaking collection of essays presents a new 'bookish' literary history, which situates questions about books at the intersection of a range of debates about the role of authors and readers, the organization of knowledge, the vogue for collecting, and the impact of overlapping technologies of writing and shifting generic boundaries.

This innovative study examines a range of canonical and non-canonical materials to open a new narrative on the mutually illuminating interchange between Romantic literature and philological theory in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Arguing that philology can no longer be treated as something that did not happen to Romantic authors, this book undertakes a substantial revision of our understanding of the intellectual and political contexts that helped determine the Romantic consciousness

Of the sixty-seven sonnets composed by John Keats fifty are commented here. The number sixty-seven is inclusive of ‘Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies’, Keats’s unfinished translation of Ronsard’s sonnet ‘Nature ornant Cassandre qui devoyt’, and of The Poet, that is not universally acknowledged as composed by Keats. The sonnets proposed thus present an ample spectrum of Keats’s sonnet writing and cover the span of his writing career, from 1814 to 1819. The sonnets are commented in chronological order: two belong to the year 1814, three to 1815, seventeen to 1816, six to 1817, thirteen to 1818 and nine to 1819. For each sonnet, the text is presented, followed by the date of composition and of the first publication. An indication of the typology to which the sonnet belongs and of its rhyme scheme is also furnished. The text is based on the editions of Miriam Allott, The Poems of John Keats, Longman, London, 1972 [1970], Jack Stillinger, John Keats: Complete Poems, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982 [1978], John Barnard, John Keats: The Complete Poems, Penguin Books, London, 1988 [1973], Nicholas Roe, John Keats: Selected Poems, Dent, London, 2000 [1995], and Paul Wright, The Poems of John Keats, Wordsworth Poetry Library, Ware, 2001. For the dating, that proposed by Miriam Allott has been followed. For each sonnet the circumstances of its composition, when known, are referred. The letters of Keats are cited to provide information on the date and on the events surrounding the writing of the poems, to furnish the poet’s own comments concerning the sonnets, and to document parallels in wording, images and thoughts, useful for the analysis on hand, as well as other more general observations and reflections of the poet retained to be pertinent for a better understanding of the poems. The edition from which the citations of the letters are taken is that of Grant F. Scott, Selected Letters of John Keats, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2002, integrated, when necessary, by that of Hyder Edward Rollins, The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, 2 vols., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1958. Other important sources of information regarding the sonnets that have here been used are Richard Monckton Milnes’s edition of the life of Keats, Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, 2 vols., London, 1848, the recollections of Charles Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (1878), Centaur Press, Fontwell, 1969, and the literary remains of the Keats Circle, collected by Hyder Edward Rollins, The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816-1879, 2 vols., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965 [1948]. For the meanings and significations of specific words, reference has been made to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. on CD-ROM (v. 4.0), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. Some of the sonnets have been commented in previous articles and books of the author, in particular in her Il primo Keats: lettura della poesia 1814-1818, Milella, Lecce, 1978, The Letters and Poems of John Keats’s Northern Tour, Europrint Publications, Milan, 1997 and John Keats and the Creative Process, Europrint Publications, Milan, 2001, but here the analyses are re-visited, integrated and modified. Tratto dall'Introduzione dell'Autrice