Project MUSE®: Keats-Shelley Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Keats-Shelley Journal.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 62 (2013) through current issueLatest Articles: Keats-Shelley JournalTWOProject MUSE®Keats-Shelley Journal2328-112X0453-4387Latest articles in Keats-Shelley Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®News and Notes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970572
<p></p>
During 2023, the Association held an annual Members' Meeting and Spring Celebration on May 11, a Spring Directors' Meeting on May 12 (both online), and a Fall Directors' Meeting on October 23 at New York University. At the May members' meeting, Dr. Camila Oliviera (University of Lisbon) presented "'Music When Soft Voices Live': Shelley's reception in contemporary music." Dr. Oliviera's talk offered an examination of Shelley's influence on music, dating from his moment to the present day. She highlighted the prevalence of "Ozymandias" in contemporary music and cover art, including surprising genres such as heavy metal.At the yearly meetings, the K-SAA officers and directors updated the membership on key issues and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallNews and Notes2025-10-02text/htmlen-USNews and Notes2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®353252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02The Soul as Sole Self in Keats's Poetry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970573
<p></p>
After the death of his grandmother in 1815, John Keats wrote an elegiac sonnet that likened her soul to a silver dove, flying up to join an "immortal quire" in "regions of peace and everlasting love" ("As from the darkening gloom" lines 9, 5). Variations on this theme recur throughout his early poetry. In the "Ode to Apollo," the souls of poetic luminaries perform bardic solos in an eternal concert; and in a sonnet to the memory of Chatterton, the stellified poet shines "among the stars / Of highest heaven" (lines 9–10). When his brother Tom turned seventeen, Keats could not help looking ahead to a day when a divine voice "shall bid our spirits fly" ("To My Brothers" line 14). The trope of the soul's ascent to an
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallThe Soul as Sole Self in Keats's Poetry2025-10-02text/htmlen-USThe Soul as Sole Self in Keats's Poetry2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®872822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02The Indemonstrable Monster: Shelley's Sublime Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970574
<p></p>
The majority of critical discussion of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) has centered on Prometheus and his relationship to Milton's Satan; however, by examining the diabolically obscure Demogorgon, we can identify Shelley's "sublime" antidote to tyrannical revolution and Satan's "taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and … personal aggrandizement" (Shelley 229–30).1 Demogorgon lurks in the dark reaches of the world, "underneath the grave where do inhabit / The shadows of all forms that think and live / … Dreams and the light imaginings of men / … Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes" (Shelley 1.1.197–202). These lines from Earth's introduction of Demogorgon hint at the creature's ghostly
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallThe Indemonstrable Monster: Shelley's Sublime Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound2025-10-02text/htmlen-USThe Indemonstrable Monster: Shelley's Sublime Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®783522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Keats's Living Hands
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970575
<p></p>
"Our bodies every seven years are completely fresh-materiald—seven years ago it was not this hand that clench'd itself against Hammond," John Keats wrote in September 1819 in a letter to his brother George (LJK 2: 208). He was referring to a disagreement that he had had with the apothecary-surgeon Thomas Hammond that may have led him to terminate his apprenticeship early.1 In recalling the incident, Keats chose to focus on an anatomical structure (his hand) and its postural disposition (clenched) to communicate the level of his emotional involvement in this quarrel. Further on in the same letter, he would observe that "'T is an uneasy thought that in seven years the same hands cannot greet each other again" (LJK 2:
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallKeats's Living Hands2025-10-02text/htmlen-USKeats's Living Hands2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®700042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Lucretia and Art in Shelley's The Cenci
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970576
<p></p>
While Shelley was living in Rome, visiting the city's galleries, and writing The Cenci (1819), paintings and other visual media preoccupied him, and his tragedy is replete with visual artistic stimuli. This essay provides a vindication of Shelley's Lucretia, and it explores a series of artworks as a context for a revised understanding of her role as a passive republican. Beatrice's greater importance has been exhaustively analyzed in critical commentary on the play,1 and detailed analyses of Count Cenci, Orsino, and Giacomo exist,2 but none of Lucretia Cenci. She appears in every act and is on stage for most of the three middle acts (2, 3, and 4) with 234 partial or whole lines—only slightly fewer than the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallLucretia and Art in Shelley's The Cenci2025-10-02text/htmlen-USLucretia and Art in Shelley's The Cenci2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®1378702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Blood, Blasphemy, and Bad Dads: Blasphemy and The Cenci
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970577
<p></p>
Percy Bysshe Shelley's tragedy The Cenci (1819) was one of the few relative commercial successes he had during his lifetime. Despite this, it was not produced for the stage—as far as we know at least—until The Shelley Society's private production of 1888, with the first public performance not following until 1922. In 1819, convinced that the infamy of his name would pose problems regardless of the contents of the work, Shelley sent the play anonymously to Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden Theatre. Harris refused to produce it, although he, in Stuart Curran's words, nevertheless wished to "acknowledge the unmistakeable talent of the anonymous playwright," signaling he was keen to see any other works that
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallBlood, Blasphemy, and Bad Dads: Blasphemy and The Cenci2025-10-02text/htmlen-USBlood, Blasphemy, and Bad Dads: Blasphemy and The Cenci2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®594432026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Quantity Time and the Life of Sensations in Jane Campion's Bright Star
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970578
<p></p>
In a 2009 interview on the release of Bright Star, director Jane Campion recalls finding in John Keats's epistolary exclamation, "O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!" a bridge between his approach to poetry and hers to film: "I understood that I was trying to photograph sensations" (LJK 1: 185; Conrad). Bright Star is a film animated by sensations that seem to stretch time, a life of temporal dilations channeled through the perspective of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Whether with longing, contentment, frivolity, or frustration, Brawne wears her heart on her sleeve—or, better yet, on her triple-pleated mushroom collar (Campion, Bright Star). Her intensity and sensitivity are reflected in the chic
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallQuantity Time and the Life of Sensations in Jane Campion's Bright Star2025-10-02text/htmlen-USQuantity Time and the Life of Sensations in Jane Campion's Bright Star2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®698692026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Teaching and Learning Wordsworth in the Wharenui
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970579
<p></p>
This piece is a dialogue between Nikki Hessell, a Pākehā (settler) academic at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand and Melissa Oliver (Ngāti Porou)—2019 Honours Graduate of Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and professional book-buyer at Unity Books. The dialogue, which is designed to reflect a treaty-based model of interaction and reflection, focuses on a limited-entry, fourth-year seminar course on Romanticism and Indigeneity.I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about the pedagogical decisions I made in this course, and then focus on Wordsworth as an example of a writer we might consider differently within Indigenous contexts. Too much decolonial
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallTeaching and Learning Wordsworth in the Wharenui2025-10-02text/htmlen-USTeaching and Learning Wordsworth in the Wharenui2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®428562026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. by Nora Crook (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970580
<p></p>
This meticulously edited contribution (hereafter CPPBS 7) to the Johns Hopkins Complete Poetry of Shelley (hereafter PBS) is the fourth volume to be published, with 4–6 and 8 yet to appear. Augmenting each text with thorough annotations, editor's commentaries, histories of criticism, and lists of textual variants – the most extensive yet in all these areas — it includes, with five slight additions, forty-seven of the works, from fragments large and small to near-finished poems, published in 1824 (and in revised editions) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS) in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (hereafter 1824). The order in which the texts appear in this new volume follows the arrangement in 1824, but
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallThe Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. by Nora Crook (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USThe Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. by Nora Crook (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®132652026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Lord Byron ed. by Jonathan Sachs and Andrew Stauffer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970581
<p></p>
Just in time to commemorate the 200th anniversary of George Gordon Byron's death comes an attractive new edition of his works, selected and edited by two eminent Romanticists, Jonathan Sachs and Andrew Stauffer. This single-volume selection of Byron's poetry and some prose enters a crowded field, starting with Jerome McGann's seven-volume "definitive scholarly edition of the poetry" (xxxii) and extending to inexpensive selected works by Oxford and Penguin Classics. What distinguishes this volume is its commitment to featuring Byron's poems "in the chronological order in which they were published," part of the "mandate of the series"—21st-Century Oxford Authors with Seamus Perry as general editor—"to reproduce all
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallLord Byron ed. by Jonathan Sachs and Andrew Stauffer (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USLord Byron ed. by Jonathan Sachs and Andrew Stauffer (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®83432026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Julian Charrière: Towards No Earthly Pole ed. by Dehlia Hannah, and: Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery: The Prelude ed. by Christine Riding (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970582
<p></p>
In Fall 2022 I taught a course on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century backstories of climate collapse. Our final weeks moved across a seemingly eclectic constellation of texts: a series of photographs by Julian Charrière wherein a man (the artist) lays siege to an iceberg; paintings by Kehinde Wiley featuring contemporary Black subjects situated against Romantic-era landscapes; the aesthetics of ecocide and figure of the wanderer as envisioned in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2016); and the public remixing of John Constable's 1821 "The Hay Wain" (held in the National Gallery, London) by protestors associated with Just Stop Oil, an environmentalist coalition working to thwart the British government from
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallJulian Charrière: Towards No Earthly Pole ed. by Dehlia Hannah, and: Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery: The Prelude ed. by Christine Riding (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USJulian Charrière: Towards No Earthly Pole ed. by Dehlia Hannah, and: Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery: The Prelude ed. by Christine Riding (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®167932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry by Nikki Hessell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970583
<p></p>
"Poetry is the unacknowledged legislation of the world" (p. 15) writes Nikki Hessell, refitting Shelley's well-known precept. Yet Hessell is more literal than even Shelley, and her global case studies give new weight to his faith in the political power of verse. Sensitive Negotiations reveals Romantic poetry's "legislative force" (p. 15) within indigenous-settler diplomatic relations from late-eighteenth-century Upper Canada to postcolonial Oceania. Hessell redefines citation as an inherently diplomatic act, examining citations of Oliver Goldsmith, Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth in the works of indigenous writers such as John Brant, George Copway, Sol Plaatje, and Sia Figiel. Quotation, she
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallSensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry by Nikki Hessell (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USSensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry by Nikki Hessell (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®97522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism by Tristram Wolff, and: Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature by Greg Ellerman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970584
<p></p>
Two new books from Stanford University Press reexamine the Romantic relationship to nature in ways that offer new paths forward for Romantic ecocriticism. Though Romanticism informed the rise of ecocriticism, it has long been under scrutiny by ecocritics for privileging the mind, the imagination, and/or the subjective self in relation to nature. Likewise, the value of the concept of "nature" (often defined by a Romantic sense, as in Timothy Clark's "Romantic-humanist" term in The Value of Ecocriticism, 2019) has been questioned, especially as ecocriticism expanded fully into a global context attentive to the histories of colonialism and its racialized violence.In their recent works, Greg Ellermann and Tristram
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallAgainst the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism by Tristram Wolff, and: Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature by Greg Ellerman (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USAgainst the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism by Tristram Wolff, and: Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature by Greg Ellerman (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®107932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic by Mathelinda Nabugodi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970585
<p></p>
Mathelinda Nabugodi's Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic holds up well to its self-description as "a critical experiment, an attempt to develop a method for reading out of the materials being read." Its subtle, inventive readings are carefully teased from the complexities of its primary texts, rather than scripted by some programmatic critical agenda. Throughout its nine scintillating chapters, which cover an incredible range of themes and motifs, the book lets the stylistic, rhetorical, and intellectual idiosyncrasies of Shelley and Benjamin command center stage. This is not to say that Nabugodi is timid as a critic: on the contrary, she takes some bold risks at the level of both form and content. Her
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallShelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic by Mathelinda Nabugodi (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USShelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic by Mathelinda Nabugodi (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®85372026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation by Joey S. Kim (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970586
<p></p>
What does pairing Coleridge's famous "Kubla Khan" and his lesser known "Mahomet" achieve? What do we learn from juxtaposing Shelley's celebrated prose manifesto A Defense of Poetry with his obscure political epic The Revolt of Islam? Rather than highlighting specific insights gained from the unexpected pairing of major and minor Romantic texts, Joey S. Kim's Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation challenges the very logic of such divides, asserting that the more obscure and more traditionally Orientalist bent of these so-called "minor" works is in fact an inalienable component of the Romantic lyric. Instead, Kim suggests that in defining the contours of the other in relation to the self, Orientalism serves as a
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallRomanticism and the Poetics of Orientation by Joey S. Kim (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USRomanticism and the Poetics of Orientation by Joey S. Kim (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®93432026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism by Mark Canuel (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970587
<p></p>
Mark Canuel's The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism argues that British Romantic writers display an antiprogressive progressivism. Most recently, Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) has forcefully maintained that the Enlightenment has been an overwhelmingly positive force. Without taking sides, Canuel points out "the distinctive contradiction that repeatedly emerges in the anti-progressive position, which does not actually produce alternatives to progressive discourses but rather offers new, but decidedly more covert, progressivisms" (p. 12).Patiently sifting through primary sources, Canuel makes a compelling case for why his keyword is so important
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallThe Fate of Progress in British Romanticism by Mark Canuel (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USThe Fate of Progress in British Romanticism by Mark Canuel (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®93052026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library by Andrew M. Stauffer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970588
<p></p>
Rarely does a literary critical book make its reader tear up, but Book Traces is suffused in layers of emotion. The book grew out of a serendipitous assignment Andrew M. Stauffer gave in a graduate seminar to examine non-rare, nineteenth-century print copies of Felicia Hemans's poetry in his university's library. In lyrical prose, he recounts the modern reader's wonder upon finding evidence of long-lost readers' feelings within old books of poetry: flowers and locks of hair preserved between pages; the date of a child's death written in the margin; underlining next to a scene of a lover leaving; inscriptions "charged with emotion" (pp. 3–4). Over the course of a decade, Book Traces became a collaborative, web-based
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallBook Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library by Andrew M. Stauffer (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USBook Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library by Andrew M. Stauffer (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®79172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Jane Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser, and: Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan by Laura Kirkley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589
<p></p>
The following review conversation initiates a new format for KSJ wherein we invite authors into conversation about their recent work.Your books both examine important Romantic women. Laura's book focuses on Wollstonecraft whose increasing canonicity presents unique challenges whereas Devoney's book seeks to illuminate the Porter sisters who are less canonical. I'd be interested to know more about the way you approached the subjects of your books and what you found unique and especially important about the approaches taken in each other's books.Reading Laura's book certainly made me wish I'd been able to say much more about how and why the Porters admired Wollstonecraft! I do feel like any readers of this exchange
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970589">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/619/image/coversmallSister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Jane Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser, and: Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan by Laura Kirkley (review)2025-10-02text/htmlen-USSister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Jane Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser, and: Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan by Laura Kirkley (review)2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®177002026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02