Keats and Scepticism

Li Ou, PhD in English (Literary Studies), the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is Associate Professor in the Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Keats and Negative Capability (2009), ‘Keats, Sextus Empiricus, and Medicine’ (Romanticism 22:2 (2016), 167-76), ‘Keats’s Afterlife in Twentieth-Century China’ (English Romanticism in East Asia: A Romantic Circles PRAXIS Volume, 2016), ‘Romantic, Rebel, and Reactionary: The Metamorphosis of Byron in Twentieth-Century China’ (British Romanticism in Asia, 2019), ‘Two Chinese Wordsworths: The Reception of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China’ (Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts, Routledge, 2019), and ‘Keats, Montaigne, and Hamlet’ (East-West Dialogues: The Transferability of Concepts in the Humanities, 2021). Her research interests include Romantic poetry, especially that of Keats, and cultural/literary relations between Greater China and Britain.

In this original and important monograph, Li Ou presents compelling evidence that Keats in his letters and poems builds upon the ancient and Enlightenment tradition of scepticism. This chimes with his own habitual, ‘equipollent’ modes of thought, tempering his ‘ardent’ idealism and sensuousness with intellectual doubts and ‘vexing speculations’.Robert S. White, Emeritus Professor, The University of Western Australia A deeply researched and enjoyably accessible new study of Keats, strikingly original in its perspectives on the poet’s intellectual affinity with the sceptical tradition in philosophy. The argument is complemented by fresh and insightful readings of the poetry, and underpinned by persuasive reflection on the presence of philosophical scepticism in Keats’s Romantic milieu. This book changes the terms of reference for our understanding of Keats as a thinker.Kelvin Everest, Emeritus A. C. Bradley Professor of Modern Literature, University of Liverpool

• Introduction Keats’s sceptical poeticsThe term ‘scepticism’Romantic scepticism Structure of this bookChapter One Keats and Pyrrhonian Scepticism: Sextus EmpiricusSceptic: non-dogmatic and investigativeScepticism: definition and key elementsSextus, Keats, and MedicineSceptical language and sceptical poeticsKeats’s self-reflexive sceptical poetics in LamiaChapter Two Keats and Renaissance Scepticism: MontaigneMontaigne’s inheritance of Pyrrhonian scepticismMontaigne’s development of Pyrrhonian scepticismKeats and Montaigne: affinitive ideasKeats’s sceptical ‘essays’: the 1819 spring odesMontaigne in the Keats circleMontaigne, Shakespeare, and HamletKeats and HamletIntersection of Keats, Hamlet, and MontaigneChapter Three Keats and Enlightenment scepticism: VoltaireVoltaire, Keats, and Keats’s circleVoltaire’s scepticism in Philosophical DictionaryVoltaire’s historiography and HyperionVoltaire’s conte philosophique and IsabellaChapter Four Keats and Enlightenment scepticism: Hume Hume, Keats, and HazlittHume’s scepticism about our understanding of the external world and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’Hume’s scepticism about our notion of the self and King StephenExcessive scepticism and The Fall of HyperionTemperate scepticism in ‘To Autumn’Afterword