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  • Keats’s Voice
  • Magdalena Ostas (bio)
Magdalena Ostas
Boston University
Magdalena Ostas

Magdalena Ostas is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Boston University. She works in the areas of Romantic literature and culture as well as the history of literary, cultural, and aesthetic theory. Her current book project in progress, tentatively titled Romanticism and the Forms of Interiority, looks at the relationship between emergent pictures of subjectivity and selfhood in Romantic-era writing (Kant, Wordsworth, Keats, Austen, and others) and their relation to questions of literary form, aesthetics, and expression.

Footnotes

1. On Romanticism and dispossession of the self, see Jacques Khalip’s Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009); on the Romantic self’s disappointment with itself, see Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999).

2. On Romanticism and the logic of the self's internalization, see Joshua Wilner, Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and on the Romantic critique of the self’s autonomy, see Nancy Yousef, Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

3. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 361.

4. For a history-of-ideas account of conceptions of the self particularly relevant for Romantic literature and philosophy, see Charles Taylor’s magisterial Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and also Jerrold Seigel’s less successful and persuasive The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For a genealogy of the notion of the self as a social form, see especially Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

5. See as representative, for example, Jonathan Culler’s passing remark in the introductory comments of his recent “Why Lyric?” (PMLA 123, no.1 [2008]) that Romantic poetics is marked by “the notion of lyric as expression of intense personal feeling” (201).

6. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 22.

7. Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 9.

8. Letter to John Taylor, 17 November 1819, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:234. For a discussion of the debate between what Levinson calls the “gorgeous tapestry school” and the “metaphysical school” of interpretation, see Keats’s Life of Allegory, 97–104. As representative of the former, see especially Earl Wasserman, who claims that the poem is “a storehouse of narrative, descriptive, atmospheric, and prosodic techniques for building a poetic dream-world” (The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953], 100); Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), who argues that the poem’s Spenserian stanzas result in “pictorial units” (438) that “tempt poetic narrative toward tableau” (441); and Grant Scott, who proposes “we read the poem as a painting” (The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts [Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994], 89).

9. Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 74.

10. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), lines 1–9. Subsequent references to Keats’s poems are quoted by lines from this edition.

11. Bate, John Keats, 448.

12. In her reading of St. Agnes, Elizabeth Fay similarly maintains that “it is the work in which [Keats] uses medievalism to overturn rather than enable romance” and that he is “not merely replicating a medieval poetic aesthetic” (Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal [Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002], 127, 135). More broadly, Fay argues that Keats’s use of medieval genre figures and conventions recuperates and revives a troubadourian tradition and ethos that aligns him with an un-nostalgic “radical medievalism” (3...

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