E-Books →The Dialogic Keats Time and History in the Major Poems

Free Download The Dialogic Keats: Time and History in the Major Poems By Michael J. Sider
1998 | 180 Pages | ISBN: 0813209099 | PDF | 1 MB
The most provocative controversy in Keats studies today concerns the historicity of Keats's poems. Since Jerome McGann's seminal essay "Keats and the Historical Method of Literary Criticism" was published in 1979, critics with new historicist leanings have debated the Victorian and New Critical canonization of Keats as an aesthete who rescued art from the contamination of time and history. However, while revealing that Keats's aestheticism is deeply embedded in the social contexts of his time, the most authoritative voices in this debate have nevertheless preserved the negative image of Keats as an aesthete by arguing that his poems attempt to retreat from the very contexts that shape them. In this comprehensive reading of Keats's major poems, Michael Sider uses the ideas of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to develop a new approach to Keats's poetry that reveals the positive nature of Keats's interaction with the competing social discourses of the Romantic period. Placing Keats's poems in dialogue with a variety of previously unexplored socioliterary contexts-a poetic dialogue about the politics of romance formed in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Rogers, and Leigh Hunt; a cultural dialogue about the temporality of epic; and an artistic debate, joined by Keats in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn, about who owns the British republic of taste-Sider uncovers Keats's active and critical response to history. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Keats, Bakhtin, and British Romanticism.