Keats, Narrative and Audience The Posthumous Life of Writing [Hardcover]

Clear but sophisticated readings of Keats's major poems, informed by contemporary literary theory.This original study offers clear but conceptually sophisticated readings of Keats's major poems, informed by contemporary literary theory. The book focuses on the relationship between narrative in Keats's poetry and its audience and readers, while also developing a theory of reading for Romantic poetry more generally.This original study offers clear but conceptually sophisticated readings of Keats's major poems, informed by contemporary literary theory. The book focuses on the relationship between narrative in Keats's poetry and its audience and readers, while also developing a theory of reading for Romantic poetry more generally.This original study offers clear but conceptually sophisticated readings of Keats' major poems that are informed by contemporary literary theory. Drawing on the recent growth in interest in the Romantic poets and their audiences, the book focuses on the relationship between narrative in Keats' poetry and its audience and readers, while also developing, more generally, a theory of reading for Romantic poetry.Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction: figures of reading; 1. Narrative and audience in Romantic poetics; 2. Keats's letters; 3. The early verse and Endymion; 4. 'Isabella'; 5. 'The Eve of St Agnes'; 6. 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'; 7. The spring odes; 8. The 'Hyperion' poems; 9. 'To Autumn'; Epilogue: allegories of Reading ('Lamia'); Notes; Bibliography, Index. In a richly suggestive reading, Andrew Bennett's Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing, locates Keats's poetry in the tension between narrative and lyric, audience and poet, public and private. The strength of Bennett's book is his fresh articulation of familiar Keatsian instabilities, oppositions, and paradoxes as an effect of what Bennett terms Keats's 'solecism,'... The Wordsworth Circle ...a lively, exciting, eminently rewarding study....Tl£b