The John Keats who came to be known, loved, and admired by the Victorians was not necessarily the Keats of historical fact who lived among his Romantic contemporaries. By engaging issues of sexual and social orientation as they meet at the nexus of masculinity, this project provides a fuller understanding of how the Keats of historical record came to be produced. It begins by examining the complexities of gender performativity in Keats, his correspondence, and his poetry, particularly in relation to the Endymion volume. The study of the homophilic postmortem co-optations of his persona that follows addresses the problematic historiography of Percy Bysshe Shelley's and Leigh Hunt's work, as well as that of other Keats Circle members, arguing not that all recollections by those who knew him were deliberately inaccurate, but rather that their motivating force often worked to promote the fame of Keats to the detriment of his critics and at the sacrifice of the man himself. While such accounts feminize Keats by implicating his role in his own death as much as the role of the critics, they also place him as shared object of the homosocial desire of an entire circle of men, an integral signifier in the nineteenth-century dialogue of what it means to be masculine. Thus, Keats develops into an iconographic figure of poetic masculinity and a source of performative emulation for those marginalized by class and sexual orientation, including the Cambridge Apostles, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Aesthetes. Ultimately, this project provides a more detailed look into the continuing popularity of a poet who was viewed by his contemporaries as a literary aberration at best, a middle-class upstart at worst, and whose canonicity is largely due to a queering of his embodiment of both interpretations / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_25070 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Contributors | Kimberly, Caroline Elizabeth (Author), Rothenberg, Molly (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds