Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives (Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850): 6 - Softcover

Brian Rejack; Michael Theune

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1800856725 ISBN 13: 9781800856721

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2021

Synopsis

In late December 1817, when attempting to name “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature,” John Keats coined the term “negative capability,” which he glossed as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Since then negative capability has continued to shape assessments of and responses to Keats’s work, while also surfacing in other contexts ranging from contemporary poetry to punk rock. The essays collected in this volume, taken as a whole, account for some of the history of negative capability, and propose new models and directions for its future in scholarly and popular discourse. The book does not propose a particular understanding of negative capability from among the many options (radical empathy, annihilation of self, philosophical skepticism, celebration of ambiguity) as the final word on the topic; rather, the book accounts for the multidimensionality of negative capability. Essays treat negative capability’s relation to topics including the Christmas pantomime, psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, nineteenth-century medicine, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Describing the “poetical Character” Keats notes that “it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.” This book, too, revels in such multiplicity.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Rejack is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University.<br /><br />Michael Theune is Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1800856725
• ISBN 13: 9781800856721
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Brian Rejack, Michael Theune