Overview
- Features essays from a range of world-renowned Keats scholars
- Opens hitherto unconsidered perspectives on Keats’s life and work as a trainee surgeon at Guy’s
- Questions whether our assessments of Keats’s genius should focus on the poet’s earlier medical years rather than, or along with, the 1819
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
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About this book
This book presents ten new chapters on John Keats's medical imagination, beginning with his practical engagement with dissection and surgery, and the extraordinary poems he wrote during his 'busy time' at Guy's Hospital 1815-17. The Physical Society at Guy's and the demands of a medical career are explored, as are the lyrical spheres of botany, melancholia, and Keats's strange oxymoronic poetics of suspended animation. Here too are links between surveillance of patients at Bedlam and of inner city streets that were walked by the poet of 'To Autumn'. The book concludes with a survey of multiple romantic pathologies of that most Keatsian of diseases, pulmonary tuberculosis.
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Keywords
Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“I did feel that the book splendidly achieves what Roe explains it set out to do, that is, ‘enabling readers to comprehend the full span of [Keats’s] creative genius with fresh knowledge, enhanced understanding and deeper insight'. Each chapter provides a most useful collection of references for further study. This book helps students of Keats’s poetry to work towards a learning of ‘a great whole’…” (Elizabeth Askey, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, 2017)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Nicholas Roe is Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He has written widely on John Keats, in books such as Keats and History (1995), John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997) and John Keats. A New Life (2012). He was for 17 years a Trustee of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and is Chair of the Keats Foundation.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: John Keats and the Medical Imagination
Editors: Nicholas Roe
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63811-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-63810-2Published: 23 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87642-9Published: 04 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-63811-9Published: 06 December 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 262
Number of Illustrations: 18 b/w illustrations
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Poetry and Poetics