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.
Reviews
Roe ... brings us to know Keats's Cockney milieu in a completely new way * Nanora Sweet, Modern Philology *
a substantial contribution to the on-going debate about Keats' politics ... Roe's volume convinces one of Keats's secure place in a version of the romantic canon that narrates the complex formation of liberalism. The major scholarly contribution of the book involves the presentation of the world of the Enfield School and the influence of Charles Cowden Clarke on Keats's formation ... Roe is an impressive literary historian ... Roe's contributions to literary history are unmistakable ... I greatly admire Roe's accomplishment in this volume ... He has given us new information about Keats's world and about the overlapping circles of metropolitan sociability in the romantic period. He has shown, by following through the daily to-ings and fro-ings of the chief actors, how permeable were the boundaries between medicine, poetics, and politics. * Anne Janowitz, University of Warwick, Romantic Circles, July 1998 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198186298
Author Nicholas Roe
Format Paperback
Page Count 340
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Dimensions(mm) 217mm * 139mm * 20mm