Nicholas Roe - Böcker

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.

Keats and the Culture of Dissent sets out to recover the lively and unsettling voices of Keats's poetry, and seeks to trace the complex ways in which his poems responded to and addressed their contemporary world. It offers new research about Keats's early life opening valuable new perspectives on 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 was lost to us as Keats entered the canon of English romantic poets.

Over the last two decades Romantic studies have been invigorated by a variety of historical methods, approaches, interests; yet work on Samuel Taylor Coleridge has remained dominated by traditional views of Romantic transcendence. Bringing together an exciting variety of approaches, the fifteen authors here redirect attention to Coleridge's relation to the 'sciences of life' - a term which embraces a much broader field than modern 'science'. Accordingly there are chapters on Coleridge and the vitalist debate, political and social ideas, race theories, dissent, literary relations, and language, as well as on his relation to contemporary optics, chemistry, geology, anatomy, and medicine. Taken all together, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life marks a vital and exciting development in Coleridge criticism.

This volume offers a reappraisal of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers before their emergence as major poets. Updated, revised, and with new manuscript material, this expanded new edition responds to the most significant critical work on Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers in the three decades since the book first appeared. Fresh material is drawn from newspapers and printed sources; the poetry of 1798 is given more detailed attention, and the critical debate surrounding new historicism is freshly appraised. A new introduction reflects on how the book was originally researched, offers new insights into the notorious Léonard Bourdon killings of 1793, and revisits John Thelwall's predicament in 1798. University politics, radical dissent, and first-hand experiences of Revolutionary France form the substance of the opening chapters. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's relations with William Godwin and John Thelwall are tracked in detail, and both poets are shown to have been closely connected with the London Corresponding Society. Godwin's diaries, now accessible in electronic form, have been drawn upon extensively to supplement the narrative of his intellectual influence. Offering a comparative perspective on the poets and their contemporaries, the book investigates the ways in which 1790s radicals coped with personal crisis, arrests, trumped-up charges, and prosecutions. Some fled the country, becoming refugees; others went underground, hiding away as inner émigrés. Against that backdrop, Wordsworth and Coleridge opted for a different revolution: they wrote poems that would change the way people thought.

Between 22 June and 18 August 1818, John Keats and his friend and collaborator Charles Armitage Brown embarked on an epic walking tour of the English Lake District, South West Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Ayrshire Burns Country, the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles, and the Great Glen north eastwards to Inverness, Beauly, the Black Isle, and Cromarty. During the tour, Keats and Brown both wrote extensive and detailed accounts of their experiences. The twelve new essays in this collection each explore the significance of the 1818 tour for understanding Keats's achievements, ranging across topics such as the contemporary Highland tour; Scottish literature, history, landscape and culture; Romantic responses to Robert Burns's life, works and places; and Keats's health and influence on Scottish artists.

This book begins with an account of the disease that killed Keats and contributed to the enduring myth that he was a doomed genius. Newspaper reports of Keats's death and early 'tribute' poems marking his demise form the substance of successive chapters, as do early attempts at researching and writing a biography of him. Keats's would-be biographers included his publisher John Taylor whose biographical endeavours preceded Keats's death, his mentor Leigh Hunt who devoted a chapter to 'Mr. Keats' in his brilliant 1828 book Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, and his friend and collaborator Charles Brown whose draft life narrative remains a vital source of information. Poised to emigrate to New Zealand, Brown passed his script and source materials to Richard Monckton Milnes enjoining him to complete the work (Brown conceded that Milnes had an advantage in having not known Keats). This book explores Milnes's efforts and success in publishing his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats in 1848 --the first full-scale biography of the poet. Milnes's book has proved a formative and enduring influence for all of Keats's biographers, and the scale and resourcefulness of Milnes's labours are explored in detail. The closing chapters trace the influence of Milnes's book in the later nineteenth century, as new editions and fresh biographies appeared and Keats's reputation grew. The volume devotes many pages to the life experiences of the two women who had been closest to Keats: his sister Fanny and his fiancé Fanny Brawne. It also reflects on the means by which the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, and Keats House in Hampstead, were secured as memorial sites.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the richness and diversity of the Romantic field. It includes 46 specially commissioned chapters by an international team of leading scholars and combines chapters offering background and contextual information with detailed readings of Romantic texts. The volume is divided into four parts - 'Romantic Orientations', 'Reading Romanticism', 'Romantic Forms' and 'Romantic Afterlives'.

An entirely new portrait of Keats, rich with insights into the torments of his life and the imaginative sources of his worksThis landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Through unparalleled original research, Roe arrives at a fascinating reassessment of Keats's entire life, from his early years at Keats's Livery Stables through his harrowing battle with tuberculosis and death at age 25. Zeroing in on crucial turning points, Roe finds in the locations of Keats's poems new keys to the nature of his imaginative quest.Roe is the first biographer to provide a full and fresh account of Keats's childhood in the City of London and how it shaped the would-be poet. The mysterious early death of Keats's father, his mother's too-swift remarriage, living in the shadow of the notorious madhouse Bedlam—all these affected Keats far more than has been previously understood. The author also sheds light on Keats's doomed passion for Fanny Brawne, his circle of brilliant friends, hitherto unknown City relatives, and much more. Filled with revelations and daring to ask new questions, this book now stands as the definitive volume on one of the most beloved poets of the English language.

This book was written over a period of six years and looks at the Romantic Movement, 1770-1848, as it featured in English literature. Chapters one and three were given as lectures to the Charles Lamb Society in 1984 and 1987, chapters five and six were first represented, repectively, at the Romanticism and Revolution Conference at Lancaster University and at the French Revolution and British Culture Conference at Leicester University. Such writers as John Augustus Bonney, Wordsworth, George Dyer and Southey are examined.

Recent critical and scholarly interest in John Keats has encouraged a resurgence of interest in his friend and mentor, the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt. This timely collection of essays by leading British and North America romanticists explores Hunt's life, writings and cultural significance over the full length of his career, arguing for the recognition of Hunt's importance to British intellectual and literary culture in the Romantic period.

Recent critical and scholarly interest in John Keats has encouraged a resurgence of interest in his friend and mentor, the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt. This timely collection of essays by leading British and North America romanticists explores Hunt's life, writings and cultural significance over the full length of his career, arguing for the recognition of Hunt's importance to British intellectual and literary culture in the Romantic period.

The unifying thrust of the book is an exploration of the tension in Coleridge's theory and practice between the Imagination and the Natural, and a delineation of the particular profile of Coleridge's imagination as compared to that of Wordsworth. There are challenging reassessments of Dejection: an Ode, Christabel and Kubla Khan, among other poems; a cluster of essays on the relations between Coleridge and Wordsworth; a strikingly original examination of Coleridge's imagination at work in the privacy of his notebooks; and an intriguing study of the neglected imagination of Mrs Coleridge. The volume opens and closes with major statements by Jonathan Wordsworth on Coleridge's primary imagination and by John Beer on Kubla Khan, and includes work by such eminent scholars as Thomas MacFarland, David Erdman, Norman Fruman, Robert Barth, Anthony Harding, and Stephen Parrish.

The poems of John Keats have traditionally been regarded as most resistant of all Romantic poetry to the concerns of history and politics. But critical trends have begun to overturn this assumption. Keats and History brings together exciting work by British and American scholars, in thirteen essays which respond to interest in the historical dimensions of Keats's poems and letters, and open alternative perspectives on his achievement. Keats's writings are approached through politics, social history, feminism, economics, historiography, stylistics, aesthetics, and mathematical theory. The editor's introduction places the volume in relation to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readings of the poet. Keats and History will be welcomed by students of English literature, and by all those interested in English Romanticism.

The poems of John Keats have traditionally been regarded as most resistant of all Romantic poetry to the concerns of history and politics. But critical trends have begun to overturn this assumption. Keats and History brings together exciting work by British and American scholars, in thirteen essays which respond to interest in the historical dimensions of Keats's poems and letters, and open alternative perspectives on his achievement. Keats's writings are approached through politics, social history, feminism, economics, historiography, stylistics, aesthetics, and mathematical theory. The editor's introduction places the volume in relation to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readings of the poet. Keats and History will be welcomed by students of English literature, and by all those interested in English Romanticism.

Taking into account recent developments in historical and ecological criticism, and incorporating fresh research into poetry and politics in the 1790s, the second edition of The Politics of Nature enlarges and updates Nicholas Roe's acclaimed study of Romanticism. Hitherto marginal figures are restored to prominence, and there is new material on William Wordsworth's radical years. The book includes the full text of John Thelwall's Essay on Animal Vitality with commentary, exploring how ideas of nature, revolution and radical science entwined.

This book presents ten new chapters on John Keats's medical imagination, beginning with his practical engagement with dissection and surgery, and the extraordinary poems he wrote during his 'busy time' at Guy's Hospital 1815-17. The Physical Society at Guy's and the demands of a medical career are explored, as are the lyrical spheres of botany, melancholia, and Keats's strange oxymoronic poetics of suspended animation. Here too are links between surveillance of patients at Bedlam and of inner city streets that were walked by the poet of 'To Autumn'. The book concludes with a survey of multiple romantic pathologies of that most Keatsian of diseases, pulmonary tuberculosis.