Keats, 1998

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE , TRANSLATED

Oliván, Lorenzo, ed. Belleza y Verdad. Madrid: Pre-Textos, 1998.

English and Spanish translations of selected poems by Keats

Thompson, Edward, ed. John Keats: A Collection of Poems. London: Crumb Elbow Publishers, 1998.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO KEATS

Argento, Dominick. Dominick Argento. London: Collins Classics, 1998. Sound recording. Includes musical settings for poems by Keats.

Bate, Walter Jackson. Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats. 1977. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Batten, Guinn. The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998.

An introduction on romantic melancholy and commodity culture, with chapters on "Byron's In-Between Art of Ennui: 'The World is Full of Orphans'" (21-71) and "Shelley's Absent Fathers: 'The Awful Shadow of Some Unseen Power'" (119-48). Other chapters discuss Blake's The Four Zoas and Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude. Batten explores the fact that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats lost at least one parent early in life and both before becoming adults. "Byron, like his self-styled Cain, digressively and obsessively returned as a poet to the scene of his parents' fall into mortality, to ruined estates and squandered legacies for whose loss Byron and Cain blame their antecedents, but especially their Father" (27). "Whether Shelley pursued an ideal other in a father figure or an ideal Other in some version of idealism," Batten argues in her reading of Alastor, "he consistently found that such pursuits left him, literally and palpably, with 'nothing'" (133). Batten discusses Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, photocopies of manuscripts of Don Juan, Cain, and his letters, as well as Shelley's Alastor, "Mont Blanc," "Eyes: A Fragment," and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," among other works.

Discusses ideology and its "logic of exchange" by considering Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, Black Sun, Tales of Love, and Revolution in Poetic Language; Judith Butler's Gender Trouble; and Slavoj Zizek's The Metases of Enjoyment.

Close readings of Byron's Childe Harold (34-36), Don Juan (45-71), and Cain (37-45), as well as Hours of Idleness (50) and The Prisoner of Chillon (36); readings of Alastor (133-40), "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (119-24), and "Mont Blanc" (141-48); general discussion (119-30) of Prometheus Unbound (120,131) and The Triumph of Life (120); discusses Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" (220-36), letters (234-35), "Ode to a Nightingale" (216-36), "To Autumn" (234), and "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be" (235).

Bedell, Jack Bryant. "The One Thing That Sticks (Original Writing, Poetry)." Ph.D. diss., U of Southwestern Louisiana, 1998, DAI, 58-10 (1999): 3466, 58 pages.

Poems reflect Bedell's life as a native of southeastern Louisiana, one who is "deeply influenced by the people, topography, and culture of the region." In "Telling It: A Critical Introduction," Bedell traces the narrative techniques that produced his collection and criticizes the self-absorbed poetry produced in America since World War II. "From Keats' theory of 'Negative Capability,' to Olson's 'Field Poetics,' to Dickey's 'Presentational Immediacy,' and finally to the 'New Narrative' movement of the last decade," this collection charts Bedell's effort to place different aspects of poetry "in seamless and unobtrusive perspective."

Bode, Christoph. "Keats as a Reader of Myth: Endymion." In British Romantics as Readers: Intertextualities, Maps of Misreading, Reinterpretations; Festschrift fur Horst Meller, ed. Michael Gassenmeier, Petre Bridzun, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Eric Pointner (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 43-54.

This essay focuses on the use Keats made of the myth of Endymion, how he read it and transformed it for his own purposes from such sources as Horne Tooke's Pantheon, Lemprière's Classical Dictionary, Drayton's The Man in the Moone (1606) and Ovid's Metamorphoses.. Bode sketches Book III and examines the fourth book of Endymion, in order to solve the mystery of the poem's "supposedly unsatisfactory and garbled ending" (46). He attempts to answer the question of "why allegorical readings of keep cropping up [even in the work of Jack Stillinger] in spite of all the contrary textual evidence" (46), which the author claims was convincingly established by Newell F. Ford in Journal of English History 14 (1947, pp. 64-76 and PMLA 62 (1947), pp. 1061-1076.

Bruss, Glen M. Profiles in Medical History. Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishing, 1998.

Includes a profile of John Keats's case of tuberculosis.

Cao, Zuoya. The Internal and the External: A Comparison of the Artistic Use of Natural Imagery in English Romantic and Chinese Classic Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

This book compares the use of "natural imagery" in English Romantic and Chinese Classic (Tang and Song dynasties) lyrics to challenge Paul De Man's belief, expressed in Blindness and Insight and The Rhetoric of Romanticism, that "the merging of the internal and external can never be reached in poetic language" (Cao 1). Cao favors M. H. Abrams' perspective in "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric." "The difference between Romantic and Chinese Tang/Song poets in their use of natural imagery is not that the former is subjective and the latter is objective, for although the Romantics use nature as a theme while the Chinese poets do not, they both employ natural imagery for expressing the inner world" (149). Compares Wang Wei, a major poet of the Tang dynasty influenced by Buddhism, with Wordsworth; contrasts Wei's "Mt. Zhongnan" and "Tintern Abbey" (8). Shows how jing (scene/the external) and qing (feeling/the internal) became a main concern in Chinese classic poetics beginning with the Tang dynasty; discusses the connotation of shenyun and sublime and makes use of Cecile Chu-chin Sun's study of three analogical modes in Chinese and English poetry, which introduces the concept of quin and jing in Chinese poetics. Vincent Yang's comparison of Su Shi and Wordsworth and An-yan Tang Wang's comparison of Du Fu and Yeats are also important for this study (3), which compares Du Fu's Confucian influenced verse ("Autumn Meditation") with Coleridge's "Eolian Harp" and "Frost at Midnight" (14; 17). Discusses Shelley as a romantic theorist and as a poet (118-20). Chapter 2, titled "The Use of Natural Objects" (43-78), is the most relevant to Keats and Shelley. In this chapter, Cao contrasts Su Shi's poem on the willow catkin with Shelley's "Sensitive Plant" ("the poets use personification to describe a plant and express their feelings by describing the fate of the plant" [52]); Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" with Li Bai's "A Song of White Clouds" ("a rare example of a poem focusing on the image of the cloud in Chinese poetry, the cloud is used to show the poet's feeling upon leaving a friend" [61]); Shelley's "The Cloud" with Li Bai's famous "Drinking Alone by Moonlight," which treats the moon as a fellow human, inviting the moon to drink with him (58); and Shelley's "To a Skylark" with Li Bai's "Peng" ("Unlike Shelley's skylark, which is a disembodied spirit, Li Bai's Peng is presented as a motor, kinesthetic image conveying 'tactile and muscular impressions,' though the Peng is not a real bird but exists only in the poet's imagination" [69]). Similar comparisons are made with Du Fu's "Lone Wild Goose" (67-69) and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" (68). This book does not include an index.

Chandler, James. "Concerning the Influence of America on the Mind: Western Settlements, 'English Writers,' and the Case of US Culture." American Literary History 10.1 (Spring 1998): 84-123.

The Compleat Silver Lining: 26 Distinguished Actors Read 41 of Their Favorite Poems. Audiocassette. BMP, Ltd., 1998.

Includes readings of Keats's "To Autumn" (Simon Ward), "A Thing of Beauty" (James Earl Jones), and "Sonnet to Sleep" (Patrick Stewart); Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" (David Warner); and Shelley's "Ozymandias" (John Standing) and "Indian Serenade" (David Warner).

Cox, Jeffrey N. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Their Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Creaser, John. "John Keats, Odes." In A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 237-46.

De Montluzin, Emily Lorraine. "Killing the Cockneys: Blackwood's Weapons of Choice against Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats." KSJ 47 (1998): 87-107.

Faflak, Joel. "Romantic Psychoanalysis: Keats, Identity, and (The Fall of) Hyperion." In Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998), 304-27.

Faflak discusses how Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion upset critical expectations of Marjorie Levinson and Jerome McGann; Faflak agrees with Tilottama Rajan that Keats was more aware of his relationship to history than Levinson and McGann give him credit for being. The "new Keats" of the new historicists is no less fictional than the earlier, "aestheticized versions of him" (305). Keats's Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion "negotiate Romanticism through a type of Lacanian mirror stage by tracing a complex narrative, from the Romantic subject's Imaginary (albeit conflicted) sense of her own omnipotence in Hyperion, to The Fall of Hyperion, a text symptomatic of Romanticism's emerging awareness of its own contingency within the Symbolic order of history" (305).

Ferris, David S. "Keats and the Aesthetics of Critical Knowledge; or, The Ideology of Studying Romanticism at the Present Time." In Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998), 103-25.

Using two poems by Keats to support his claim, Ferris argues that the aesthetic need not be opposed to the political, since the aesthetic is the "rhetoric of the political rather than an ideology opposed to history" (123). He discusses moments of "visual reference" in Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," which "compares the effect of hearing Chapman's translation of Homer to the arrival of Cortez on the isthmus of Panama" (119). The poem "takes up the question of . . . transforming literature into the aesthetic representation of a critical subject" (115). Ferris then discusses "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which "develops out of the sequence of questions that dominates its first verse" (120): "there is no visual reference other than what Keats tells us in the poem" (121).

Finegan, Ann Jennifer. "For a Charging of the Passions: Sex and Metaphysics in English Romantic Poetry (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, William Wordsworth)." Ph.D. diss., U of New South Wales, 1998, DAI, 59-08A (1998): 2999.

Inspired by Lacan's Encore, this dissertation analyzes the consummation scenes which appear in English Romanticism's "long, metonymical poems of desire--Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Keats's Endymion, and the Hyperion poems." Coleridge's theological writings are examined against Kant's synthetic imagination "from the point of view of the repression of desire." Artaud's essay on Coleridge uncovers Coleridge's "disavowing tactics which reveal the processes of the unconscious under the screen of a fake occult." Coleridge's unpublished Notebooks show that his unfinished Logosophia "attempted to reconcile logos with desire." Blake and Wordsworth are discussed through Lacan's metaphorics of delusion and Heidegger's aletheia ("through which being deconceals").

Gaillard, Theodore L., Jr. "Keats's 'To Autumn.'" Exp 56.4 (Summer 1998): 183-88.

Glaister, Dan. "Fade Far Away, Dissolve . . . to Dylan the Rhymes They Are A-Changin." Guardian, Mar. 27, 1998, 1, 3.

Feature article comparing Bob Dylan and Keats.

Hamlin, Cyrus. Hermeneutics of Form: Romantic Poetics in Theory and Practice. New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1998.

This book "consists in a series of essays, all of which were written independently of one another . . . over a twelve-year period from 1971 to 1983," when Hamlin was teaching at the University of Toronto (22). Chapter 5 contains an addendum on Keats and Shelley as "practitioners of the Romantic ode" (24). Hamlin's interest in Hölderlin influences readings of a number of poems. Hamlin discusses Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" (240-53) in terms of Shelley's use of a Greek chorus and Dantesque rhyme scheme, with echoes of souls as dead leaves from Virgil's Aeneid VI. Hamlin finds the last stanza of the ode crucial for a consideration of the work's hermeneutics of form (250). "The poem itself as achieved form serves as an instrument or vehicle for the voice of the poet, which is no longer merely a human subject or the individual self" (250). Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" (238-40, 242-46, 253, 254) is also discussed. "No reader of Keats' 'Nightingale' will fail to observe . . . that the structure of the ode is defined by the experience within the poet's mind resulting from his response to the bird's song" (245). Nine chapters on "The Limits of Interpretation"; "The Negativity of Reading"; "The Conscience of Narrative"; "The Poetics of Self-Consciousness"; "Reading the Romantic Ode"; "The Temporality of Selfhood"; "Platonic Dialogue and Romantic Irony"; "Strategies of Reversal in Literary Narrative"; and "The Faults of Vision; a Dialogue in Identity and Poetry." Chapter 5, which contrasts Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" with Keats's and Shelley's poetry, concludes by discussing Hegel and the Romantic ode (6).

Hanke, Michael. "Keats Reading Spenser." In British Romantics as Readers: Intertextualities, Maps of Misreading, Reinterpretations; Festschrift fur Horst Meller, ed. Michael Gassenmeier, Petre Bridzun, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Eric Pointner (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 107-16.

Charles Cowden Clarke read Spenser's "Epithalamion" (1595) with Keats, and lent him the first volume of The Faerie Queene (1790). Hanke discusses stylistic influences of Spenser on Keats: chiastically placed adjectives ("Sleep and Poetry", 195fr; Endymion, 910; "Lamia" I,327); nouns surrounded by adjectives ("The Eve of St. Agnes", 57; "Lamia" I, 98); and the accumulation of synonyms or near-synonyms (Endymion, 637f), which had been banned by the classicists. Keats turned Spenser's love of parallelisms into mannerisms. He concludes the essay by considering differences between the poets in order to show "how independent a Spenserian Keats, in fact, was" (109). Keats explores the theme of appearance and reality in "Lamia" (a theme absent from Spenser's writings, according to Hanke) and rejects Spenserian didacticism; he also differs from Spenser in refusing to distinguish between lust and love, or love and religion in poems such as "The Eve of St. Agnes."

Hofkosh, Sonia. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Includes chapters titled "Introduction: Invisible Girls," "A Woman's Profession: Sexual Difference and the Romance of Authorship," "The Writer's Ravishment: Byron's Body Politics," "Classifying Romanticism: The Milliner Girl and the Magazines," "Disfiguring Economies: Mary Shelley's Gift-Book Stories," "The Author's Progress: William Hazlitt's Keswick Escapade and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal," and "Romanticism in the Drawing Room: Austen's Interiority."

Hofkosh's third chapter, "Classifying Romanticism: The Milliner Girl and the Magazines," briefly considers the periodical press lampoon of Leigh Hunt as "King of the Cockneys" (66). "Invisible girls are scripted into romantic tradition in particularly material configurations--as bodies, among objects, like books, in the marketplace--even as they appear to be overlooked or, what may amount to the same thing, looked over" (3). She discusses Byron's letter to Walter Scott describing the circumstances that attended his dedication to Scott of Cain. Both Keats and Byron owed their literary fame to the very Bluestockings they despised and who read them (54). In her chapter on Mary Shelley, "Disfiguring Economies," Hofkosh turns her attention to Mary Shelley's writings for annual gift books. "Between the death of Percy Bysshe in 1822 and the death of Sir Timothy in 1844, Shelley supplements the subsistence income her father-in-law begrudgingly lends her out of her son's future estate by writing short stories, many for such annual gift books as The Keepsake and Heath's Book of Beauty." Hofkosh argues that "these narratives explicate in their various frames Shelley's negotiations between two economies of value--of authority, authorship, self--in which the body, especially the female body, is inseparably implicated. Shelley's stories respond on the one hand to an aristocratic economy of patrilinear inheritance and, on the other hand, she recognizes an economics of the marketplace, what Percy Bysshe called 'the shop interest'" (86) wherein production disfigures the writer.

Hopkins, Robert W. The Religious Searching of John Keats. Amherst: n.p., 1998.

Jacobs, Matthew Eric. "William Wordsworth and the Evolution of Style: A Study of Philosophical Differences in the Poetry of Wordsworth and Keats." Honors thesis, Coe College, 1998.

Kucich, Greg. "'A Haunted Ruin': Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment." In British Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays, ed. Terence Allan Hoagwood and Daniel P. Watkins (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London: Associated UP, 1998), 56-83.

Kucich argues that the very success of London's nineteenth-century playhouse drove Romantic writers away from it (58). Among other topics, he explores the elitist implications of Shelley's and Byron's experiments in closet drama and seeks to explain why Beddoes and Keats felt "uneasy about their dramatic ambitions" (77).

Kucich, Greg. "John Keats." In Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael O'Neill (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998), 143-66.

Kucich prefers Bate's biography to Ward's, and makes a number of evaluative assessments of biographical works which are "of mixed quality" (146). "The time is ripe for a major new scholarly biography," Kucich writes, with no mention made of Andrew Motion's new study (unfortunately, these probably passed in the press). Kucich traces the earliest published reactions to Keats in the periodical press and the focus on his intellectual depth, irony, deconstructive poetics, psychology, style, and influences, which "placed Keats at the centre of Romantic studies for several decades" (148). "Shaw's delightfully iconoclastic essay, which claims that Keats would have become a 'fullblooded modern revolutionist,' is required reading for anyone working on Keats and politics" (150). Kucich discusses the perceived gap in new historicist work between Levinson's (1988) and Watkins' (1989) studies and Roe's 1995 Keats and History and his 1997 John Keats and the Culture of Dissent.

Labbe, Jacqueline M. Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender, and Romanticism. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1998.

This study seeks "an enlarged and more dynamic understanding of what Karl Kroeber calls 'romantic landscape vision.' It is no longer enough to postulate a single or unified Romantic approach to landscape. To concede or even share the eminence would surely threaten to eliminate masculine dominance, yet the female voices inhabiting the landscape shape it, just as their male counterparts complicate their own expected stances" (xxi). Labbe's first chapter considers what the prospect view signifies for male and female poets. Chapter 2 considers whether women can apprehend the foundations of the sublime if they are considered antithetical to it. Her third chapter argues that the garden and bower occupy "gendered cases of seclusion and isolation" (xix). Chapter 4 considers "travel writing's adaptation" of the sublime and picturesque by considering Priscilla Wakefield's A Family Tour (1804) alongside of William Wordsworth's Guide through the District of the Lakes" (xx) (1810). Her fifth chapter contrasts Reynolds' "distaste for the detail" in his Discourses with Mary Delany's detailed flower pictures and Anna Seward's poetry. In her reading of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (107-12), Labbe shows that Keats demonstrates how the bower is "subversively female" and points out "what happens when the bower is already inhabited by a feminine subject able to make some use of its subversive potential power" (107).

Lau, Beth. Keats's Paradise Lost. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998.

Lau's book begins with three chapters that set forth the historical circumstances surrounding the practice of textual annotation in the Romantic period, and, more specifically, an analysis and categorization of the notes and markings Keats jotted in the margins of his copy of Paradise Lost. These chapters are followed by a transcription of all of the relevant marginalia. The book thus expands on earlier editors' efforts in that it includes Keats's underlinings and markings, not just the notes themselves. The result is a much clearer picture not only of Keats as a reader but also of the creative processes by which Milton's epic exerted a transformative influence on Keats's poetry and poetics. [KG]

Lewis, Dearing. "A John Keats Letter Rediscovered." KSJ 47 (1998): 14-18.

Lewis, Deborah Ellen. "Engendering Death: Keats and the Female Figure (John Keats)." Ph.D. diss., U of Alabama, 1998, DAI, 59-09A (1998): 3466, 199 pages.

This dissertation explores Keats's interest in creative success, the feminine, and death, as well as the evolution of his philosophical stance on these concepts. The study considers how gender was constructed in the early nineteenth century; Freud and Lacan's account of the relationship between death and the feminine; and Luce Irigary's more contemporary variety of feminist thought. "These perspectives on gender, death, and the psychoanalytic fuel an intensive look at those of Keats's works, dated 1818-1819, that are related to the romance genre, particularly 'Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,' 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' and 'Lamia.'" Keats acknowledged the "feminine" in his own psyche, and the price of such an acknowledgment is male death.

Lopez, Debbie. "'Ungraspable Phantoms': Keats's Lamia and Melville's Yillah." In Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, ed. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler (South Carolina: Camden House, 1998), 159-71.

Lopez imagines an encounter with "a hideously fat Byron (now reconciled with his wife), a politically converted Shelley, and a dead Wordsworth" to show Keats's struggle in writing "Lamia." Keats's Lamia is not only a female demon but also a fabulous monster, perhaps the "monster" of Romanticism itself (6).

Magnuson, Paul. Reading Public Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

The first chapter makes use of Jurgen Habermas' definition of the "public sphere" to define a "public discourse." The second chapter explores the genres and rhetoric of this public discourse with readings of Coleridge's "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison," first published in Southey's Annual Anthology, where it was framed as a public letter to Charles Lamb. Chapter 3 explores Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" in Fears in Solitude (1798), defined by reviewers as a German poem. The word German meant "Jacobin" in the 1790s (9). The final two chapters "explore the issue of poetic and political legitimacy" with readings of the dedication to Don Juan and Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "Much of the poetry published between 1789 and 1830 is public poetry, but one cannot discover its public nature by reading individual works of literature apart from the public discourse that literature enters when it is published. Justice cannot be done to a work's literary and cultural significance by disregarding its various locations in collections of the author's own poetry, collaborative publications with several authors, reviews, newspapers, or anthologies" (3). Chapter 5 reads the "paratextual Dedication to Don Juan as an address to Southey composed from many of the reviews and parodies of Southey's laureate verse and the satire on him in the public press. Chapter 6 reads the 'leaf-fringed legend' in 'On a Grecian Urn' in the Annals of the Fine Arts, where it supports the aesthetics of Haydon, Hazlitt, and Richard Payne Knight--an esthetics that opposed not only the ideal art of Sir Joshua Reynolds, but the system of patronage that supported the Royal Academy and what Hazlitt called legitimacy" (10). Magnuson focuses on lyric poems considered nonpolitical because their public significance has been lost in the late-twentieth century.

Miller, Christopher Robert. "The Romantic Lyric: Perception into Form." Ph.D. diss., Harvard U, 1998, DAI, 59-05A (1998): 1585.

Romantic poetry is read through thematic lenses such as Nature, transcendence, secularized Christianity, creative imagination, and history more often than through formal ones. Yet the Romantic writers drew on eighteenth-century landscape poetry and struggled to order poetic perception in characteristic ways. Miller examines lyrics by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats as "narratives of perception enacted in formal inventions and revisions of earlier poetry, with particular attention [paid] to the shifting ratio between lyric self and phenomenal world." Discussing contemporary philosophical and aesthetic discourse, he addresses differences between "pre-Romantic" and Romantic poetry in nuances of poetic language and procedure. Close readings of evening poems by Wordsworth ("Tintern Abbey"), Coleridge ("This Lime Tree Bower"), and Keats ("To Autumn") are read against evening poems by Virgil and Milton (Il Penseroso and Paradise Lost). This study considers the "structure, syntax, and narrative shape of the Romantic lyric" by considering "the subtle design in each poet's synthesis of prior forms."

Moise, Edwin. "Madeline's Dragons." N&Q 45.2 (June 1998): 200

Moise focuses on stanza 40 of Keats's"The Eve of St. Agnes."

Motion, Andrew. Keats. 1st American ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.

Motion, Andrew, narr. The Last Journey of Keats. Videocassette. Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1998.

Narayan, Gaura Shankar. "Split Subjectivity: Reconciling Gender Identity with Poetic Identity in British Romanticism." Ph.D. diss., Columbia U, 1998, DAI, 59-07A (1998), 2525.

This dissertation discusses Blake's Milton and his creation of the figure of the androgyne; Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" as an exemplary instance of "the androgynous plurality of the Wordsworthian subjectivity"; and the "conclusive and compensatory" addresses to Dorothy and Coleridge in The Prelude as "evidence of the poet's desire to relinquish the masculinist mode of historical epic in favor of domestic autobiography." Narayan discusses Keats's feminized imagination as evident in "Lamia" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." "The unresolved narrative tension of Keats's circular narrative poems is a symptom of the inability of the narrative to contain the female presences in the poems who thereby gain power and poetic privilege which they share with the poet in order to produce a writing subject pluralized in the direction of androgyny."

O'Rourke, James L. Keats's Odes and Contemporary Criticism. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998.

This book is "indebted to the deconstructive methods of reading that flourished in Romantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s" and takes "the dominant critical paradigms of the present to be the New Criticism" (ix, x). O'Rourke questions the validity of McGann's critique of deconstruction as the culmination of a "text-only" criticism ("Keats," MLN 94 [1979]) and shows how Derrida led to interdisciplinarity in literature departments in North America. A chapter on "Ode to a Nightingale" shows "the limits of . . . modes of formalist criticism in conveying the affective valence of literary language"; by contrast, Kristevan semiotique captures "the aesthetic power of the poem" (x). In his chapter on "Ode on a Grecian Urn," O'Rourke argues that "close study of the controversies over Greek sculpture in Regency England shows that Keats engages precisely [and more subtly] the same questions regarding the relation between the individual artwork and its cultural context that now inform the ode's most recent critical history" (xi); "Ode on Melancholy" compares "the exaggerated posturing of the ode with the explanatory power of psychoanalytic texts . . . Keats was well aware of the artifice behind the ode's turn to sensuous excess" (xi). In "To Autumn," O'Rourke argues that "the poem's own negative dialectic, between a nostalgic celebration of organic presence and an awareness of the unbridgeable gap between the unmoored activity of consciousness and the inexorable predictability of nature, is a more nuanced treatment of its central themes than is found in either the formalist celebrations of its perfection or the political critique of its supposedly reactionary intentions" (xi).

Payling, Catherine. "Report from Rome." KSR 12 (1998): xi.

The Internet site for Keats-Shelley Memorial House is http://www.demon.co.uk/heritage/Keats.House.Rome/Visitors. "Visitors to the site can see the interior of the museum, read about the lives and works of the poets, and the history of the Association itself. The site also carries information about the activities of the Association in London and Rome."

Ragusa, Daniela Antonina. "The Dialectic of Romance and Imagination in John Keats's'The Eve of St. Agnes.'" M.A. thesis, Southern Connecticut State U, 1998. MAI, 37-01 (1998): 0072, 51 pages.

This essay explores the interaction between romance and imagination in Keats'spoem, exploring how Medieval codes of courtship function through Romantic ideals of love. Madeline and Porphyro acquire "tragic vision," the ability to see each other as separate from themselves. "Subjecting his characters' ideal dreams of romance to the tragic realities of mortality in 'The Eve of Saint Agnes,' Keats modernizes ideas of love and death by criticizing certain elements of Medieval ideology while simultaneously praising others through Romantic imagination."

Rajan, Tilottama. "Keats, Poetry, and 'The Absence of the Work.'" MP 95.3 (Feb. 1998): 334-51.

Reeves, Lisa Malaine. "'Straining at Particles of Light in the Midst of a Great Darkness': Desire and Dissolution in the Poetry of John Keats (Zen Buddhism, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger)." Ph.D. diss., U of Georgia, 1998, DAI, 59-06A (1998): 2039, 202 pages.

This dissertation explores Keats's changing relationship with desire, by making use of the phenomenological ideas of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Reeves uses Husserl's concepts to explicate Endymion; Endymion's desire to transcend the everyday world, the theme of the mind's relation with other minds, and the exploration of the Other are connected with Husserlian concepts of spatial and temporal awareness. The sonnet "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" illustrates the transition between Endymion and Hyperion. Hyperion is discussed in terms of Heidegger's Being and Time. Themes in Keats'sfive odes parallel the direction Heidegger's interests took after finishing Being and Time. The Fall of Hyperion mirrors Heidegger's interest in eastern thought; "To Autumn" "finds dissolution of desire by accepting the present moment."

Robinson, Jeffrey C. Reception and Poetics in Keats: My Ended Poet. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

Robinson, Roger. "The Origins and Composition of James Beattie's Minstrel." Romanticism 4.2 (1998): 224-41.

Robinson explores how Beattie came to write a work that was so influential on Cowper, Burns, Bowles, Rogers, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Clare, Keats, and Tennyson.

Ryan, Robert M., and Ronald A. Sharp, eds. The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998.

Sandy, Mark. "'To See as a God Sees': The Potential Ubermensch in Keats's Hyperion Fragments." Romanticism 4.2 (1998): 212-23.

Sharpe, Kevin, and Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

Interesting historical discussions on the "failure of republican culture in seventeenth-century England" (Kevin Sharpe); George III and the language of sentiment (John Barrell); the politics of song in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (Gerald Izenberg); the politics of cold bathing (Mark Jenner); gender difference and commercial culture in mid-eighteenth century England (Harriet Guest); garden politics in eighteenth-century England (Stephen Bending); and the pastoral revolution (Michael McKeon). Roy Porter's essay on "Medicine, Politics, and the Body" argues that "Romantic poets seized on the emblematic possibilities of the insane. William Blake rejoiced that he was himself divinely mad, while in his ode 'On Melancholy' Keats aspired to the condition of a melancholiac, implying that depression was the wellSpring of creativity and the deepest human experience. Ironically, it took another romantic, Charles Lamb, to challenge these attitudes" (221) and avoid glamorizing madness in his essay "The Sanity of True Genius."

Sider, Michael. The Dialogic Keats: Time and History in the Major Poems. Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 1998.

Divided into two parts, this book discusses Wordsworth's "Vaudracour and Julia," Samuel Rogers' Jacqueline, Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini (50-65), and Keats's "Isabella" (66-88), Endymion (97-113), Hyperion (114-27), and The Fall of Hyperion (128-44), with an epilogue on "Keats's'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and the Political Theory of Art" (145-64). "Although we have lately seen the emergence of Bakhtinian studies within the confines of Romantic studies, no one has ventured to develop a full-length Bakhtinian reading of Keats," though McGann and Marilyn Butler encouraged such readings. A dialogic approach to Keats "emphasizes the culturally responsive nature of his poems" (4).

Sühnel, Rudolf. "Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.'" In British Romantics as Readers: Intertextualities, Maps of Misreading, Reinterpretations; Festschrift fur Horst Meller, ed. Michael Gassenmeier, Petre Bridzun, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Eric Pointner (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 35-42.

This essay places Keats's poem in the context of his emotional and intellectual life at the time, focusing on Charles Cowden Clarke's memory of inviting Keats to examine a rare folio edition of Chapman's The Whole Works of Homer, Prince of Poets (1816). Sühnel discusses how reading Ovid and translating the Aeneid influenced the composition of the poem. The questing poet of Keats's sonnet is compared, in lines 9 and 10, to an astronomer searching the heavens with his telescope. This is a reference to F. W. Herschel's discovery of Uranus in 1781 which Keats read about in a book he received as a school prize, John Bonnycastle's Introduction to Astronomy. "The plate of the book's frontispiece by the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli shows an allegory of astronomy as the celestial msue Urania" (41). Sources for the reference to Balboa, such as Robertson's History, are also discussed.

Taylor, Anya. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780-1830. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

This is the first study to "describe the bulk and variety of writings about drink; to set these poems, novels, essays, letters and journals in a historical, sociological and medical context; to demonstrate the importance of drunkenness in the works of a number of major and minor writers of the period; and to suggest that during these periods, for a short time, the pleasures and pains of drinking are held in a vivacious balance" (1). After discussing the historical realities of drinking, Taylor turns to the drunkenness of Robert Burns as seen by William Wordsworth; of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son, Hartley; of Keats; and of women Romantic poets and writers, including Hannah More, Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maria Edgeworth, who criticize male drinking more directly than their male counterparts. Extended discussion of Keats's poems in a chapter titled "'Joy's Grape': Keats, Comus, and Paradise Lost IX": includes readings of Endymion (166-72), Hyperion (165), "To Autumn" (168), "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (161, 169), "Ode to a Nightingale" (176-77; 183-87), "Lamia" (183; 187-88), and "Ode on Melancholy" (164-65), with accounts of Byron's interactions with Sheridan.

Thomson, Heidi. "Eavesdropping on 'The Eve of St. Agnes': Madeline's Sensual Ear and Porphyro's Ancient Ditty." JEGP 97.3 (July 1998): 337-51.

Thomson takes issue with Earl Wasserman and Jack Stillinger's reading of "The Eve of St. Agnes," noting that "Madeline's desire is largely ignored" (340). Instead, she emphasizes how Porphyro's song, "La Belle Dame sans Mercy," is played into Madeline's ear in "The Eve of St. Agnes" (337) and becomes a test for her feelings for Porphyro (349).

Tremper, Ellen. "Who Lived at Alfoxton?": Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell UP; London: Associated UP, 1998.

Chapters on Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Discusses the influence of Shelley on modernists (211-14) and echoes of Keats's work in Woolf's writings (210). Primary focus on Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf.

Turley, Richard Marggraf. "Handy Squirrels and Chapman's Homer: Hunt, Keats, and Romantic Philology." Romanticism 4.1 (1998): 104-19.

Negative reviews of Hunt's poetic diction are best understood in terms of Hunt's effort to emulate a pre-Restoration tradition of authors such as William Browne, Edmund Spenser, and George Chapman, who he hoped would displace Pope and Johnson. Hunt's ideas about pre-Restoration diction were borrowed from ideas proposed by Johann Gottfried Herder. Keats's "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem," published in his 1817 volume, signals a key movement in the form of his literary taste by reflecting his admiration of Hunt's The Story of Rimini. Concludes by discussing "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (115).

Wagenheim, Lavanda Caldwell. "Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'Ode to a Nightingale': A Kristevan Reading of the Speaker as 'Subject-in-Process' (John Keats)." M.A. thesis, U of South Alabama, 1998, MAI, 37-01 (1998): 0073, 82 pages.

Previous studies "overlook the odes' textual aporia and privilege the texts rather than the voice of the poems or the identity of their speaker." This study traces "the semiotic drive and symbolic order of poetic language." It concentrates on "the identity of the speaker in the odes as the Kristevan 'subject-in-process/on trial,' the abject subject who perpetually strays from a unified ego state to the ambiguous state of 'negative capability.'" The reader, text, and speaker are viewed as "incomplete, ambiguous, divided, and subjective by nature."

White, R. S. "'Like Esculapius of Old': Keats's Medical Training." KSR 12 (1998): 15-51.

White examines two copies of a guide to students entering Guy's Hospital, by an author writing under the name of "Aesculapius." "The Preface to both editions is dated 'this 20th day of Aug. 1816," when Keats was still in residence at Guy's" (17). Examining the guides gives insight into Keats's reading as a medical student.

Wootton, Sarah. "Keats in Early Pre-Raphaelite Art." KSR 12 (1998): 3-14.

Wootton explores Stephen Prickett's assertion that Keats was "the most potent single influence upon the art of the Victorian era" by examining his influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their enthusiasm for Keats shocked the art establishment because of his reputation as a "coarse, effeminate, and presumptuous" writer. William Holman Hunt acquired an edition of Keats'sverse in 1847 and acquainted John Everett Millais and Dante Rossetti with the "discovery." Wootton discusses Keats's"The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro," subsequently known as "The Eve of St. Agnes"; Millais' Isabella and Lorenzo; and Hunt's sketch, Lorenzo at His Desk in the Warehouse, which was completed after Hunt and Millais observed a Chartist demonstration (9).

Wu, Duncan, ed. A Companion to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

This book has been devised to assist both teachers and students of Romanticism (x). The first section, "Contexts and Perspectives 1790-1830," provides historical, intellectual, and literary contexts, including studies of reading patterns of the period. "Readings," the second section, offers critical introductions to canonical and non-canonical works, including Lyrical Ballads, Keats's odes, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and Beachy Head, Mary Tighe's Psyche, Felicia Hemans' Records of Woman, and Joanna Baillie's A Series of Plays. The final section introduces the reader to "Issues and Debates," including feminism, gender criticism, new historicism, eco-criticism, and dialogic approaches. Essays also discuss topics such as imagination, the German influence, scientific developments, and apocalypse. Though clearly new historical in approach, this volume claims to embody "the range of critical thought" in Romanticism (x). Essays by Nelson Hilton, David Bromwich, Jonathan Wordsworth, and John Lucas; articles by Susan Wolfson, David Simpson, Morton D. Paley, Douglas B. Wilson, Angela Esterhammer, and Alan Richardson.

Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Anthology of Romantic authors. Includes selections from Blake, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Hazlitt, Hunt, and the Shelleys.

Yuan, Changming. "Politics and Poetics: A Comparative Study of John Keats and Li-He." Ph.D. diss., U of Saskatchewan, 1996, DAI, 58-12 (1998): 4643.

This dissertation compares Keats and Li-He, a Chinese writer during the T'ang dynasty period (600-899). In his first chapter, Yuan explores "romanticism" as a term with crosscultural literary value; he then considers the biographical and sociopolitical milieux of these poets; his third chapter discusses patriotism as a theme in Keats'sand Li's work: Keats is concerned with issues of freedom, while Li discusses problems of national reunification; chapter 4 considers Keats'stendency to satirize conservative governments and reactionary institutions; Li comments on the "decadence of the ruling classes and the darkness in his political reality." Chapter 5 discusses each poet's concern with human suffering, while chapter 6 considers Keats'sand Li's quests for the ideal in the world of art, nature, myth, and dream.