For many readers, John Keats's achievement is to have attainted a supreme poetic maturity at so young an age. Canonical poems of resignation and acceptance such as 'To Autumn' are traditionally seen as examples par excellence of this maturity. In this highly innovative study, however, Marggraf Turley examines how, for Keats, an insistence on 'boyishness' in the midst of apparent mature imagery is the very essence of his political contestation of the literary establishment.
1. 'Strange longings': Keats and feet
2. 'Full-grown lambs': immaturity and 'To Autumn'
3. 'Give me that voice again': Keats and puberphonia
4. Japing the Sublime: naughty boys and immature aesthetics
5. 'Stifling up the vale': Keats and 'c--ts'
Afterword
Biography
Richard Marggraf Turley is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author ofThe Politics of Language in Romantic Literature (2002) andWriting Essays: A Guide for Students in English and the Humanities (2000). He is currently working on a co-edited collection of essays tracing Romantic influence in twentieth-century literature.
'Keat's Boyish Imagination is a worthy successor to an important if edgy tradition of Keats criticism ...' - BARS Bulletin & Review, Issue No. 26
