Résumés
Abstract
Despite John Keats’s widely acknowledged literary and cultural impact on writers of the Victorian period, little work has been done to explore the biographical methods by which this impact came about. By closely examining the publications and private correspondence of the Keats Circle during the 1820s and 1830s, one can see various patterns to the biographical development of Keats, particularly in relation to their subject’s masculinity. From the widespread eulogies immediately following the poet’s death, to Hunt’s 1828 biographical sketch in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, to Brown’s 1836 biography manuscript, threads are spun simultaneously of Keats as icon of middle-class masculinity, perpetually youthful Aesthetic ideal, and object of queered desire. Through the complexities of this process, the Keats Circle itself becomes a model of queered male companionship, centred around Keats as a shared object of homosocial affection. The Circle, along with the Cambridge Apostles who would assume control of the biographical project in the 1840s, thereby provide an earlier exemplum of late-Victorian Hellenism than has been previously noted, and establish a crucial conduit for the biographical basis of Keats’s Victorian fame.
Parties annexes
Works Cited
- Allen, Peter. The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.
- Blunden, Edmund, ed. Shelley and Keats as They Struck Their Contemporaries. London: C.W. Beaumont, 1925. Reprinted London: Folcroft, 1970.
- Brown, Charles. “Charles Brown: Life of John Keats.” The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers and More Letters and Poems of the Keats Circle. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965. 52-97.
- Clarke, Charles Cowden. “Charles Cowden Clarke’s Letter to the Morning Chronicle on ‘JOHN KEATS, THE POET.’” Keats Reviewed by his Contemporaries: A Collection of Notices for the Years 1816-1821. Ed. Lewis M. Schwartz. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1973. 327-330.
- Croly, George, ed. Beauties of the English Poets. London, 1828.
- Dalby, J.W. “J.W. Dalby’s ‘Remarks on Keats’ in the Pocket Magazine of Classic and Polite Literature.” Keats Reviewed by his Contemporaries: A Collection of Notices for the Years 1816-1821. Ed. Lewis M. Schwartz. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1973. 316-319.
- Deacon, Richard. The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University’s Elite Intellectual Secret Society. London: Royce, 1985.
- Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.
- Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.
- Ford, H. George. Keats and the Victorians: A Study of His Influence and Rise to Fame, 1821-1895. New Haven: Yale UP, 1944.
- Hood, Thomas, ed. The Gem. n.c., 1829.
- Housman, Robert Fletcher, ed. A Collection of English Sonnets. n.c., 1835.
- Hunt, Leigh. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1891.
- ———. Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries with Recollections of the Author’s Life, and of His Visit to Italy. London: Colburn, 1828. New York: AMS, 1966.
- “Impotence.” Oxford English Dictionary. Online. 2005.
- Keats, John. “Endymion.” The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1988. 106-216.
- ———. “The Two Prefaces to Endymion.” The Complete Poems. Ed. John Barnard. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1988. 503-508.
- Martin, Robert Bernard. Tennyson: the Unquiet Heart. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
- Najarian, James. Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
- Reynold, John Hamilton. “J.H. Reynolds Alludes to Keats in his Preface to The Garden of Florence.” Keats Reviewed by his Contemporaries: A Collection of Notices for the Years 1816-1821. Ed. Lewis M. Schwartz. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1973. 324-325.
- Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers and More Letters and Poems of the Keats Circle. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965.
- Schwartz, Lewis M., ed. Keats Reviewed by his Contemporaries: A Collection of Notices for the Years 1816-1821. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1973.
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
- Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Adonais.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. 388-406.
- ———, trans. Plato: The Banquet. Provincetown, MA: Pagan, 2001.
- Sterne, Lawrence. “A Reference to Keats in a ‘Posthumous Epistle From the Author of Tristam Shandy’ in the Gossip.” Keats Reviewed by his Contemporaries: A Collection of Notices for the Years 1816-1821. Ed. Lewis M. Schwartz. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1973. 320.
- “Verses to Keats by ‘P.’ in the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review.” Keats Reviewed by his Contemporaries: A Collection of Notices for the Years 1816-1821. Ed. Lewis M. Schwartz. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1973. 313-314.
- Watts, Alaric A., ed. The Poetical Album, and Register of Modern Fugitive Poetry. 2 vols. London, 1828–9.
- Wolfson, Susan J. “Keats Enters History: Autopsy, Adonais, and the Fame of Keats.” Keats and History. Ed. Nicholas Roe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 17-45.