Inaug.-diss.-Marburg. Lebenslauf.

[No abstract available] / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This analysis of Keats's poem proffers evidence and arguments to support the contention that The Eve of St. Agnes presents allegorically the poet's speculations regarding the relationship between eros and agape, speculations which include a sharp criticism of Christianity and a model for a new, more "humanistic" system of salvation. The union of Madeline and Porphyro symbolizes the reconciliation of the two opposing types of love in an apocalyptic marriage styled on the Biblical union of Christ and the Church. The irony inherent in the poem arises from Keats's use of Christian myths, symbols, and sacraments to accomplish this purpose.

Bibliography: leaves 304-316 / 316 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1994

The present dissertation proposes a fresh approach to Keats's remarkable growth and development as a poet by assessing his works in relation to four different but interrelated contexts: the tradition of poetry as a "speaking picture," Lacanian interpretations of that tradition, the related nature of classical Chinese poetry, and parallels between Keatsian themes and Taoist principles. Chapter one seeks to assess Keats's poetry by articulating the relationship between "ut pictura poesis" on the one hand, and psychoanalysis and Taoist philosophy on the other. Chapter two deals with the invisible ground of the sympathetic imagination. Chapter three discusses Keats's philosophy of "negative capability" with reference to the Taoist philosophy of the "Middle Path." Chapter four compares Keats's Lamia to the Chinese legend The White Snake. Chapter five concludes the work by showing how the poet matures into "poethood" through an anamorphotic process of developing from the imaginary to the symbolic. The focus of this dissertation is on the pictorial and sculptural qualities of Keats's poetry in comparison with many poems in the Chinese and western traditions. Efforts have also been made to combine psychoanalytical theory and Taoist philosophy and poetics to shed light on the discussion. Even though the dissertation seeks to assess Keats's poetry through an analogy with the plastic arts and to extend this assessment through conceptual categories provided by psychoanalysis (with reference to the poet's maturing into "poethood") and Taoist philosophy (with reference to the poet's philosophy of "negative capability"), it does not assert that Keats is a psychoanalyst nor does it claim that he is a Taoist. Keats is mainly a poet dealing with human emotion, love, beauty, truth, and imagination — a poet with "no self," a poet who can be regarded as "the perfect man" (Tao Te Chinq, 18) in the truest sense of a Taoist.

Starting with Jerome McGann's landmark 1979 essay "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism," the recent sixteen-plus years of Keats criticism brims to overflowing with the dominance of New Historicism and its archaeological recovery of the political, historical Keats against the previous preeminence of a formalist, aesthetic Keats. The grip of New Historicism now holds tightly enough, perhaps, to the point where it suffers from a lack of attention to formalist, aesthetic, stylistic differentials and peculiarities. A critical position, then, that addresses this lack of attention looks to be an assessment of the relationships between New Historicism and formalism: how, in fact, New Historicism owes a debt to the formalist ways of reading it works to overcome. Such ways of reading find one of their most powerful statements in Keats himself--and, in a startlingly close twentieth-century analogue, the reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser. The readings here of Keats's poetry consider how it reveals that Keats, like Iser, holds the germ of New Historicism's methodology, as it falls under the general taxonomy of Iser's theory but for how it actually dramatizes and predicts that theory. Reading, for Keats, ultimately places one in a dynamic relationship with history--a relationship always of potential, perpetually "widening speculation" to "ease the Burden of the Mystery" that is history.

The author's doctoral thesis, Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan. cf. p. (6).