Epic and pastoral traditions in the poetry of John Keats.
Item
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Title
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Epic and pastoral traditions in the poetry of John Keats.
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Identifier
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AAI9325163
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identifier
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9325163
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Creator
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Wassil, Gregory John.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rachel Brownstein
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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This dissertation locates the basis of Keats's poetics in the concept of Negative Capability. Following Jerome McGann's argument that readers of romantic texts avoid incorporating romantic self-representations into their readings of the poetry and apply critiques that uncover the contradictions that lie beneath the surface of romantic texts, some critics have seen Keats's poetry as expressing a dis-ease representative of the emerging middle class in general to which he belonged and whose relationship to experience is mediated by money, a materiality which replaces older authentic "spiritual" relationships to experience. Keats's relationship to the traditions of poetry, in this view, is mediated by translations of original texts and thus never quite engages the authentic experience familiarity with these texts promises. This dissertation relocates the emergence of Keats's concept of negative capability within the traditions of epic and pastoral poetry and sees Keats as continuing a history of use and revision of these traditions to formulate a poetic representative of a particular modern state of being. In such a view, the traditions become resources for poets that are dynamically used to express experience. Keats's concept of negative capability has its origins in one such reworking of epic and pastoral material and in a reconsideration specifically of literature relating to the Conquest of the New World and Egypt. In locating his poetics and problematic heroism within these peripheral areas, Keats offers his poetic as an advance on tradition as well as a response to negative effects of European ascendancy in the Americas, Africa, India, and East Asia.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
