MICHAEL O’NEILL (ed.). John Keats in Context

Abstract

This collection of scholarly reassessments in the interests of ‘a full-scale reconsideration of Keats’s achievement and its enabling contexts’ (p. 3) 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’. Individual chapters are most likely to be accessed individually and occasionally, rather than collectively and sequentially, but read continuously the volume is characterized by a set of overlapping references and preoccupations. Each chapter relates select incidents or aspects of the poet’s life, thought, and poetry which have featured in a previous chapter and will reappear in subsequent chapters in ways that work the information or observation into the chapters’ own argument, without (it should be said) too much annoying repetition. The fraught lives and deaths of Keats’s father and mother, his grandmother (Alice Jennings) and brother Tom, for example, recur throughout the opening chapters, though they read differently in the first chapter on ‘Biographies and Film’ (Sarah Wootton) than they do in the next on ‘Formative Years and Medical Training’ (Hrileena Ghosh and Nicholas Roe), in the third on ‘Surgery, Science and Suffering’ (Roe again), the fourth on ‘Fanny Brawne and Other Women’ (Heidi Thompson), the fifth on ‘Mortality’ (Sahidha Bari), or the sixth on ‘Travel’ (Jeffrey C. Robinson).