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Download (8MB) https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Keats: Women, Readers and Revision Thesis submitted to the University of Glasgow By Hye-Young Park In fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Literature University of Glasgow August 2000 ProQuest Number: 10395219 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10395219 Published by ProQuest LLO (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 VI ' ft: ,'ft -■ is 'ftp ft# '# 4 ftfft -ft V":| ■ftS GLASGOW un iv e r sity l ib r a r y IH50-C0PV 2 Abstract This thesis examines tlmee apparently unrelated matters, Keats’s representation of women in his poems, his responses to his readership, and his habits of revision, and argues that these are in fact aspects of Keats’s work that are intimately comiected one with another. It is divided into tlnee parts. The first part is introductory. In the first chapter I place my own work in relation to the recent trends in Keats criticism that have impinged on it most forcibly. In particular, I consider the recent work, best represented perhaps by Susan Wolfson, that has countered the traditional emphases of Keatsean scholarship by developing an approach that might loosely be described as feminist, and the work, best represented by Andrew Bennett, that has focused on Keats’s responses both to the assumed readers of his poems and to their reviewers, most importantly their hostile reviewers. The two critical approaches are comiected, as Wolfson amongst others notes, by the fact that during the course of Keats’s professional career women became, and were recognised as having become, a constituency of the poetry reading public so powerful as to determine the commercial success of any volume of poetiy. My second chapter is biographical. In it, I attempt to ground Keats’s complex responses to women in the material, social realities of his life by examining his relationship with three women in particular: Jane Cox, Isabella Jones, and Famiy Brawne, although I call attention also to the striking absence in Keats’s writing of a fourth woman, his mother. Ill The division between the second and third parts of the thesis borrows Andrew Bennett’s understanding of the distinction between narrative poetry, which is always and explicitly addressed to a reader, and lyric poetry, in which the poet sings to himself and is only overheard by his reader. In the second part of the thesis I treat, in chronological order of their composition, Keats’s major narrative romances; Endymion, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, Isabella^ The Eve o f St Agnes, Lamia, and the two versions of Hyperion. In each case I focus on the erotic relationship between a man and a woman that is at the centre of the poem, the relationships between Endymion and Cynthia, la belle dame and the knight at arms, Isabella and Lorenzo, Madeline and Porphyro, Lamia and Lycius, and, in The Fall o f Hyperion between the poet dreamer and Moneta. But in each case, too, I focus on significant acts of revision, for example, the original and revised preface to Endymion, the two texts of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, and the revised stanzas in The Eve o f St Agnes. Sometimes I employ an extended notion of the act of revision, understanding, for example, the second part of Lamia as a revision of its first part, and The Fall of Hyperion as a revision of Hyperion. I argue throughout that through the erotic relationships Keats explores the relationship between the masculine poet, himself, and the poet’s reader, who is consistently figured as feminine, but I seek to show also that for Keats himself, as for the culture of which he was a product, masculine and feminine are inherently unstable terms, terms that resist any attempt to fix their significance. Keats’s revisions, I argue, both attest to and explore this instability. IV In the final part of the thesis, I turn to Keats’s lyric poems, first the great odes and then the sonnets that Keats wrote at the veiy end of his poetic career. Of all Keats’s poems the odes have received the fullest critical treatment. My own study of them is distinctive in that it understands Keats’s practice in these poems in relation to his handling of the romance form. It follows that for me the ‘Ode to Psyche’ is the critical poem, because Keats chooses a topic that lends itself to treatment in the form of a verse romance such as Endymion, and had indeed already given Mary Tighe the subject matter for one of the more popular verse romances of Keats’s day, and self-consciously refuses the possibility. The visionary encounter with the goddess does not yield a narrative, but rather a still tableau in contemplating which Keats comes to apprehend the nature of his own poetic authority. In this chapter I explore the consequences of replacing the erotic encounters that mark the verse romances with a solitary contemplation of an object such as a nightingale’s song or a Grecian urn, but in the odes, as I argue, such objects are consistently feminised. In my final chapter I turn to a group of poems by Keats, which have, by contrast, received rather little attention. The odes are public poems, poems written with publication in mind, whereas the late somiets seem private poems. Keats seems to have had no thought of publication when he wrote them, and they were not finally published until long after his death. They were written, it seems, not for a readership, but for a private reader, whether that reader be Keats himself or an intimate friend such as Fanny Brawne. In these poems, too, I locate the themes and many of the devices that I have identified in the poems that Keats himself chose to publish, but they appear here in a new guise. Fanny Brawne is the central figure in this chapter, but I present her rather differently from the manner in which she has often been presented by Keatsean scholars. I am less interested in the details of her emotional relationship with Keats than in the activities that they shared together, and one activity in particular: they read together. In the months before he finally left England for Italy Keats enjoyed an experience that he had not fully known before, an intimate social relationship with a woman reader, and a woman reader of his own poems. VI CONTENTS Abstract II Contents vi Abbreviations viii Acknowledgements X Part I. I. Introduction: Women, Readers and Keatsean Revision 1 1. Lord Byron and Mr. Keats 8 2. Keats: ‘A Life of Allegoiy’ 18 II. Keats’s Circle of Women and the Female Reading Public 30 1. Keats’s Women Circle and Regency Taste 33 Keats Reading Women and Women Reading Keats 51 Part II. The Narrative Poems I. Endymion: Questioning the Romance and Pacing “towards the temple of fame” 60 1. Two Prefaces and the Reception of Endymion 66 Romantic Encounters and Female Figures 74 II. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’: Anxiety about Gendering 89 1. “Caviare to the general” 91 2. The Indicator Text and the Brown Text 93 III. Isabella, or, The Pot o f Basil: Making “old prose in modern rhyme more sweet” 101 1. Hazlitt’s ‘Lecture on Dryden and Pope’ 104 2. “All this wormy circumstance” and Boccaccio 106 vil IV. The Eve o f St. Agnes: “purple riot” and a Readerly Stratagem 120 1. “Try the Public Again” 122 2. A Stratagem and Revision 127 V. Two Lamias: Authorial Oxymoron, “in pale contented sort of discontent” 138 1. Lamia’s Creation: the Oxymoronic 142 2. Lycius and the Public 152 VI. Two Hyperions: Unaccomplished Reconciliation with “the trickery and iniquity of these Plagues” 161 1. An “Un-Keatsean Project” 161 2. “Too Many Miltonic Inversions” 166 3. The Poet and “Unknown Feminity” 177 Part III. The Lyric Poems I. The Great Odes: a Series of Hieroglyphics 186 1. ‘Ode to Psyche’ : Sustaining the Romantic Narrative 192 2.‘Ode to a Nightingale’ : Vision, or, Dream? 199 3. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: An Enigma 207 4. ‘Ode on Melancholy’ : Moneta and Melancholy, the Feminine 214 II. Late Sonnets: “Till love and fame to nothingness do sink” 218 1.
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