John Keats in Context

Description

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.

Michael O'Neill is Professor of English at the University of Durham, and has published widely on Romantic, Victorian, and twentieth-century poetry. His works include The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry (1989), Romanticism and the Self- Conscious Poem (1997), and The All-Sustaining Air (2007), and, as editor, The Cambridge History of English Poetry (Cambridge, 2010). He is also the co-author (with Michael D. Hurley) of Poetic Form (Cambridge, 2012) and the co-editor (with Anthony Howe and with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan) of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). His latest collection of poems is Gangs of Shadow (2014).

'For new readers of Keats, the problem is staying abreast of 200 fertile years of reviews, criticism and biographies. John Keats in Context works as a curative. The final four essays on reception and Keats scholarship from 1821 to the present (by Kelvin Everest, Francis O'Gorman, Matthew Scott and Richard Marggraf Turley) are essential reading ... In O'Neill's volume, Keats is prevented from settling into a single mode - medical student, cultural observer, reader, philosopher, liberal, friend, nurse, lover - but rather given space to exhibit these fluctuations. The strongest essays follow Keats through critical dicta into less settled territory.' Christy Edwall, The Times Literary Supplement 'Michael O'Neill's edited collection of essays presents very succinct statements on different aspects of Keats's life and writings ... The need for brevity enforces on the writers a compressed succinctness, and the length of each essay is perfect for reading on a half-hour bus journey (I speak from experience). ... The diversity and depth of Keats's involvement in the many contexts represented in O'Neill's excellent collection stimulate reflections on the multi-faceted poet's other interests and influences ... Michael O'Neill and his team in this handsome and well-conceived volume ... have done Keats proud by giving him the contexts which well and truly position him where he wished to be, 'among the English Poets'.' R. S. White, European Romantic Review 'This collection of scholarly reassessments in the interests of 'a full-scale reconsideration of Keats's achievement and its enabling contexts' ... comprises thirty-four short chapters of around ten pages each, organized into six parts: 'Life, Letters, Texts'; 'Cultural Contexts'; 'Ideas and Poetics'; 'Poetic Contexts'; 'Influence'; and 'Critical Reception'.' William Christie, The Review of English Studies