John Keats and the Culture of Dissent
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:13th Feb '97
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- Paperback£100.00(9780198186298)
This book overturns received ideas about Keats as a poet of `beauty' and `sensuousness', offering a compelling account of the political interests of Keats's poetry and showing why his poems generated such a bitterly hostile response from their first critics. It sets out to recover the vivacious, pugnacious voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. Roe offers new research about Keats's early life which opens valuable and often provocative new perspectives on his poetry. This book offers a completely new account of Keats's schooldays, opening a fresh perspective on both his life and his poetry.Two chapters explore the dissenting culture of Enfield School, showing how the school exercised a strong influence on Keats's imaginative life and his political radicalism. Imagination and politics intertwine through succeeding chapters on Keats's friendship with Charles Cowden Clarke; his medical career; the `Cockney' milieu in which Keats's poems were written; and on the immediate controversial impact of his three collections of poetry. The author deftly reconstructs contexts and contemporary resonances for Keats's poems, retrieving the vigorous challenges of Keats's verbal art which outraged his early readers but which have been lost to us as Keats entered the canon of visionary romantic poets.
Roe's book can be recommended, especially for its two chapters exploring the dissenting culture of Enfield School ... A vivacious and pugnacious Keats, a radically disconcerting Keats, an erotically subversive Keats - this is the Keats that emerges from this volume. * Robert Nye, The Scotsman *
Nicholas Roe's book is a masterpiece that combines scholarship and political understanding in equal measure. * Michael Foot, The Observer *
nothing about his politics has ever been as good as the latest addition: Nicholas Roe's, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent * Michael Foot, Ham & High (Hampstead & Highgate Express) *
Keats and the Culture of Dissent gathers several other nuggets which scholars will be pleased to add to the collections. * TLS, 22 August 1997 *
a substantial contribution to the on-going debate about Keats's politics ... Roe's volume convinces one of Keats's secure place in a version of the romantic canon that narrates the complex formation of liberalism. The major scholarly contribution of the book involves the presentation of the world of the Enfield School and the influence of Charles Cowden Clarke on Keats's formation ... Roe is an impressive literary historian ... Roe's contributions to literary history are unmistakable ... I greatly admire Roe's accomplishment in this volume ... He has given us new information about Keats's world and about the overlapping circles of metropolitan sociability in the romantic period. He has shown, by following through the daily to-ings and fro-ings of the chief actors, how permeable were the boundaries between medicine, poetics and politics. * Anne Janowitz, University of Warwick, Romantic Circles *
ISBN: 9780198183969
Dimensions: 225mm x 145mm x 24mm
Weight: 524g
336 pages