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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.26692 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Johnstone, Michael, 1971- |
| Contributors | Kaufman, Robert (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001572855, proquestno: MQ29497, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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