John Keats in Context

Michael O'Neill is Professor of English at the University of Durham, and has published widely on Romantic, Victorian, and twentieth-century poetry. His works include The Human Mind's Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry (1989), Romanticism and the Self- Conscious Poem (1997), and The All-Sustaining Air (2007), and, as editor, The Cambridge History of English Poetry (Cambridge, 2010). He is also the co-author (with Michael D. Hurley) of Poetic Form (Cambridge, 2012) and the co-editor (with Anthony Howe and with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan) of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). His latest collection of poems is Gangs of Shadow (2014).

• Part I. Life, Letters, Texts: 1. Biographies and film Sarah Wootton; 2. Formative years and medical training Nicholas Roe and Hrileena Ghosh; 3. Surgery, science and suffering Nicholas Roe; 4. Fanny Brawne and other women Heidi Thomson; 5. Mortality Shahidha Bari; 6. Travel Jeffrey C. Robinson; 7. Letters Madeleine Callaghan; 8. Manuscripts and publishing history John Barnard; Part II. Cultural Contexts: 9. The Hunt circle and the Cockney School Gregory Leadbetter; 10. London Timothy Webb; 11. Politics Richard Cronin; 12. Sociability Grant F. Scott; 13. The visual and plastic arts Nancy Moore Goslee; 14. Religion and myth Anthony John Harding; Part III. Ideas and Poetics: 15. The Enlightenment and history Porscha Fermanis; 16. Keats and Hazlitt Duncan Wu; 17. Imagination, beauty and truth Charles W. Mahoney; 18. The poetical character Seamus Perry; 19. The senses and sensation Stacey McDowell; 20. Prosody and versification in the Odes Michael O'Neill; Part IV. Poetic Contexts: 21. Poetic precursors (1): Dante and Shakespeare Chris Murray; 22. Poetic precursors (2): Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope Beth Lau; 23. Contemporaries (1) (and immediate predecessors): Tighe, Radcliffe, Southey, Burns, Chatterton, Hunt, Wordsworth Michael O'Neill; 24. Contemporaries (2): Coleridge, Byron, Shelley Jane Stabler; 25. Ballad, romance and narrative Andrew Bennett; 26. Epic and tragedy Susan J. Wolfson; 27. Lyrical genres Christopher R. Miller; Part V. Influence: 28. Tennyson to Wilde Herbert F. Tucker; 29. Hardy, Edward Thomas, Stevens, Bishop, Heaney Michael O'Neill; 30. American writing Mark Sandy; Part VI. Critical Reception: 31. Contemporary reviews Kelvin Everest; 32 Critical reception, 1821–1900 Francis O'Gorman; 33. Keats criticism, 1900–63 Matthew Scott; 34. Keats criticism, post-1963 Richard Marggraf Turley.

'For new readers of Keats, the problem is staying abreast of 200 fertile years of reviews, criticism and biographies. John Keats in Context works as a curative. The final four essays on reception and Keats scholarship from 1821 to the present (by Kelvin Everest, Francis O'Gorman, Matthew Scott and Richard Marggraf Turley) are essential reading … In O'Neill's volume, Keats is prevented from settling into a single mode - medical student, cultural observer, reader, philosopher, liberal, friend, nurse, lover - but rather given space to exhibit these fluctuations. The strongest essays follow Keats through critical dicta into less settled territory.' Christy Edwall, The Times Literary Supplement