Although critics have studied extensively the Gothic writings of Charlotte Dacre (Rey, King, Rosa Matilda), they have rarely discussed her work as Jewish writing, and they have largely ignored the poetry and fiction of her younger sister Sophia King (Fortnum). In fact, both sisters, daughters of perhaps the most well-known Jew in England at the time, John King (Rey), never severed connections with their father and wrote both directly and obliquely as Jewish women; moreover, they were read as Jewish women. The historical trauma of the Jewish expulsion from Iberia and the persecution by the Inquisition is reflected in the writings of these Sephardic women. Fearlessly innovating within the Gothic, sentimental, and philosophical traditions of writing, they also subversively played against sexual stereotypes, linking their work to women like Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, and anticipating the sexually explicit work of Philip Roth and I. B. Singer. Moreover, their use of the supernatural draws upon Jewish traditions of dybbuks and demons in the past and in the future. Reading the work of Charlotte Dacre and Sophia King re-inscribes the importance of Jewish contexts within Romantic aesthetics.

This essay argues that the Keats portrayed in Jane Campion’s Bright Star is a product of the twenty-first century’s Etsy culture—and that this portrayal, if somewhat surprising or even counterintuitive, effectively captures Keats’s understanding of the relationship between poetic making and imperfection. The paper both compares Keats’s presence on the handicraft-marketing platform Etsy.com to his characterization in Campion’s hand-centric film and identifies the ways in which the Keats of contemporary popular culture has become an appealing and textually reasonable model for entrepreneurial crafters and other aspiring artisans.

This essay reflects on Keats’s crossover success as a hyper-canonical and popular poet for contemporary middle-brow readers, contextualizes scholarly discourses about his poetry’s longstanding (and often vexed) connections with popular culture, and introduces the essays in Keats in Popular Culture, which investigate popular culture artifacts and mediums as well as popular literature involving Keats. "Keats in Between" recalls three longstanding embarrassments for teachers and scholars of literary history—popular culture, media, and affect—which routinely have been defined in opposition to (while continuing to inform) the high canon of English literature, and it posits Keats’s two-hundred year reception history as an exemplary case for examining popular culture as a generative, shape-shifting borderland where liking/loving and responding to literature intermingles, sometimes indistinguishably, the tastes of the people and the elite.

This essay considers Keats’s unique appeal to the New Critics of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. It returns to a landmark in American literary studies—Cleanth Brooks’s study of Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn"—drawing on Brooks’s unpublished personal and professional papers to place his work in the context of mid-century disciplinary and methodological changes. At a time when greater access to American higher education created what we might call a “classroom public” for poetry, Brooks’s study of Keats advocates for and models the close, collective reading of poetry, idealistically figuring the university classroom as a site of social inclusion while also summoning the conservative historical fantasies associated with Southern Agrarianism.