Victorian Keats

Manliness, Sexuality and Desire

J. Najarian

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780333985830
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230596856
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the sexual implications of reading Keats. Keats was lambasted by critics throughout the nineteenth century for his sensuousness and his 'effeminacy'. The Victorians simultaneously identified with, imitated, and distrusted the 'unmanly' poet. Writers, among them Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and Wilfred Owen came to terms with Keats's work by creating out of the 'effeminate' poet a sexual and literary ally.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Keats’s “Posthumous Life”: Corpus and Body
• 2 Keats, Sexuality, and Tennyson’s Reticence
• 3 Keats and Arnold’s Dandyism
• 4 Keats, Hopkins, and the Landscapes of Desire
• 5 Keats, Symonds, and a Language for Desire
• 6 Keats and Pater’s Eroticism
• 7 Keats, Wilfred Owen, and a Tradition of Desire
• Afterword
• Appendix I: Lord Alfred Douglas, “Two Loves”
• Appendix II: John Addington Symonds, “The Genius of the Vatican”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index