Keats and Social Context: Lamia

Abstract

Practical criticism founded on a social-historical theory is still relatively unusual in studies of Keats: thematic approaches and text-based methods of formalism remain dominant (with exceptions that I shall be discussing below). What results are interpretations of particular poems, or sets of poems. An argument about method can open a different hermeneutic field. So long as the questions we ask of critical works are themselves written within one critical school, then commentary on a particular poem will be subject to that school's parameters. The present essay therefore constitutes an argument about criticism, in order to open a new range of subsequent commentary. I offer at the end of this essay a commentary on Lamia as an example of the kind of practical interpretation that a historical method can engender; but the space for that kind of commentary must first be opened by an argument about interpretation. To analyze present and past studies of Keats is to discern some assumptions and convictions that limit and predetermine interpretive conclusions. To define these problematic and limiting assumptions is to clear space for alternative approaches. Hegemonic convictions reign in part by virtue of their invisibility; local customs have a way of looking like universal laws of nature, or common sense. To define the limits of currently dominant assumptions in Keats criticism, or in studies of Romanticism, can (negatively) alienate those assumptions, distancing and relativizing them; it can also (positively) generate constructive alternatives.