Keats's Reading / Reading Keats: Essays in Memory of Jack Stillinger

by Beth Lau (Editor), Greg Kucich (Editor), Daniel Johnson (Editor)

Overview

This book explores John Keats’s reading practices and intertextual dialogues with other writers. It also examines later writers’ engagements with Keats’s poetry. Finally, the book honors the distinguished Keats scholar Jack Stillinger and includes an essay surveying his career as well as a bibliography of his major publications. The first section of the volume, “Theorizing Keats’s Reading,” contains four essays that identify major patterns in the poet’s reading habits and responses to other works. The next section, “Keats’s Reading,” consists of six essays that examine Keats’s work in relation to specific earlier authors and texts. The four essays in the third section, “Reading Keats,” consider how Keats’s poetry influenced the work of later writers and became embedded in British and American literary traditions. The final section of the book, “Contemporary Poetic Responses,” features three scholar-poets who, in poetry and/or prose commentary, discuss and exemplify Keats’s impact on their work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030795320
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	02/13/2022
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	362
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Beth Lau is Professor of English Emerita at California State University, Long Beach, USA. She has published numerous studies of Keats’s books, reading, and marginalia, including Keats’s Reading of the Romantic Poets (1991) and Keats’s Paradise Lost (1998). Her other research interests include Jane Austen and cognitive-evolutionary approaches to literature.

Greg Kucich is Professor of English and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA. His publications include Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (Penn State UP 1991) and numerous books and articles on the Keats-Hunt Circle, Romantic-era drama, and Romantic-era women writers.

Daniel Johnson is English; Digital Humanities; and Film, Television, and Theatre Librarian at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He has published articles on long eighteenth-century literature and digital humanities. He also co-edited (with Beth Lau and Greg Kucich) a digital edition of Keats’s annotated copy of Paradise Lost.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Keats the Reader.- 3. Keats's Metaphor of Reading.- 4. Keats's Translational Poetics.- 5. Rereading Keats's Reading in the Digital Realm.- 6. “Jack a Lanthern” Verse: Of Pots and Precursors and Poetic Value in Isabella.- 7. Keats Reading Chaucer: Troilus and Arrested Time in The Eve of St. Agnes.- 8. Keats’s Confrontation with Nothingness in “When I Have Fears” and Other Poems.- 9. Seeing Spots: Milton, Addison, Keats, and the Emergence of the Sublime Pathetic.- 10. Keats as a Reader of Novels.- 11. Late Reading: John Clare and John Keats.- 12. Keats’s Formal Legacy and the Victorians.- 13. “A Season Changes Color to No End”: Keats’s “To Autumn,” Wallace Stevens, and the Post-Romantic Imagination.- 14. Modern Experimental Poets Reading Keats: “Misers of Sound and Syllable”.- 15. The Chameleon Poet.- 16. Writing on Keats, Writing with Keats: Ghostlier Intonations, Marginalia, and Epigraphs Among Friends—Or, My Keats.- 17. Poems

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Bringing together superb scholars, the editors offer a volume worthy of its dedicatee, the great Keats scholar Jack Stillinger. We get both a fresh exploration of Keats’s reading and of how he reads—with Keats translating the classics, tackling Chaucer, and reading novels—and accounts of others reading Keats: how did Clare, the Victorian Keatsians, or Wallace Stevens make Keats their own? The volume concludes with a special treat: contemporary poets writing about and with Keats."

- Jeffrey Cox, Professor of English & Humanities, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Editorial Reviews

Keats’s Reading / Reading Keats is a gathering of seventeen chapters that celebrate not just Keats, but also Jack Stillinger, who passed away in 2020. This memorial volume is, then, not intentionally set off by the various Keats bicentenaries, but it does act as a kind of capstone to them. … Keats’s Reading / Reading Keats is divided into four topical sections, which are fully diverse within themselves … .” (G. Kim Blank, European Romantic Review, Vol. 34 (4), August, 2023)

From the Publisher