ABSTRACT This collection of nine essays celebrates the bicentennial of Keats's last lifetime volume—Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1 July 1820 [Figure 1]). We aim to challenge prevailing stories about the 1820 volume and identify new ways to consider its thirteen poems. Our methodologies include book history, cultural studies, and formalist reading practices; authorship, genre, and reception theories; economic, political, transnational, gendered, racial, religious, and scientific contexts. Our hope is to stimulate ever new readings and appreciations of the poems in this astonishing volume.

ABSTRACT In 1806, the renowned French medical expert Jean-Nicolas Corvisart published a treatise that represented over twenty years of work on percussion and auscultation, specialized diagnostic methods that allowed him to interact directly with patients’ bodies to diagnose illnesses of the thorax. Translated into English in 1813 as A Treatise on the Diseases and Organic Lesions of the Heart and Great Vessels, Corvisart's book quickly found its way onto the shelves of the medical library at London's Guy's Hospital, where John Keats famously spent eighteen months studying during the years 1815 through 1817. In this essay, I argue that Keats not only likely knew of Corvisart's treatise but also integrated a conception of Corvisartian diagnostic methodology into the fabric of his poetry and thought and especially in his later writings, including Hyperion: A Fragment (1820) and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (comp. 1819). As I show, Corvisartian techniques and methodologies as well as Keats's detailed training in anatomy and physiology help us to understand better not only the fall of the Titan Hyperion and his replacement by Apollo, the Olympian poet-healer in Hyperion, but also Keats's abandonment of both characters for the dreamer poet-physician of The Fall of Hyperion.

ABSTRACT Keats’s final volume of poetry is justly celebrated for its longer narrative poems—the title poems and the fragment of Hyperion included at book’s end—and for the odes which remain vastly influential examples of lyric high seriousness. However, at the same time that Keats was preparing his book for publication in late 1819 and early 1820, he was also writing a longer narrative poem that wouldn’t make it into print until 1848: The Cap and Bells. This work was the last major poetic project on which Keats labored before he died, but even so, it remains remarkably understudied. Our essay attempts a reframing of Keats’s final book by reading it back through the lens of his “faery tale’s” satire. We do so by posing a mental experiment: what if the final poem of the 1820 volume had not been Hyperion but rather The Cap and Bells? By exploring this possibility, we aim to amplify the undertones of, and so engage more fully, the 1820 volume’s humor and playfulness.

In an essay that I have long included in introductory courses on reading and writing about literary texts, J. Hillis Miller acknowledges that “what actually happens within a given person’s mind and...

Irish writers of the Romantic-era were confronted with a number of dilemmas when attempting to navigate the literary marketplaces of the British Archipelago. Claire Connolly notes that the extensio...

During the last quarter-century academic presses have issued a steady stream of important studies of Scottish Romanticism. Beginning with Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (1997), and featuring ...

The Women’s March on Washington in 2017, organized in protest of the 2016 election of the American president Donald Trump, spawned a worldwide movement. Two years later, women in more than thirty c...

ABSTRACT This essay examines Anna Barbauld’s public protest through her antiwar afterlife and her contemporaneous reception, including accounts of her support for the French Revolution in the Belfast News-Letter. The essay identifies heretofore unknown reprintings of Barbauld’s antiwar rhetoric from Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation in a range of sources, from nineteenth-century British newspapers to nineteenth-century American schoolbooks to an early twentieth-century journal in Newfoundland to a Vermont newspaper in 1918, among others. Included in this “afterlife” is a work heretofore not addressed in scholarship. The piece is called “The Contrast: Or Peace and War,” published in The Athenaeum (1807). Barbauld’s “The Contrast,” the first prose poem in English, betrays an increasing pessimism that would find its profoundest expression in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). The essay contends that the Biblical cadences and pedagogical style of Barbauld’s landmark Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) represent a formal underpinning for the unsentimental expressions of “The Contrast.” Scholars must pursue with renewed vigor efforts to “uncover” or “unmask” evidence of women’s protest writing that became anonymously excerpted for a public readership. Despite the odds, Barbauld’s protests nevertheless persisted.

ABSTRACT During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the busy north-western Spanish commercial port of Corunna became the stage for a series of memorialization strategies focusing on an exceptional group of military heroes who died in the area or whose mortal remains were buried there. In a city notable for being a bastion of Liberal political ideas, actions taken to preserve the collective memory of military figures—such as the Scottish general John Moore, an ally of the Spanish during the Peninsular War, or Spanish officers such as Porlier, Acevedo, and Espoz y Mina, who were responsible for various uprisings against King Ferdinand VII—necessarily led to the construction of provisional or permanent tombs to house their mortal remains. Considered martyrs and heroes fallen in defense of liberty, the political glorification of these figures tied in with the romantic sensibility to produce a varied set of funerary memorials and, above all, the creation of sites of memory that made this maritime city a forerunner to the national pantheon coveted by Spanish liberales as a means of legitimizing their political ideals.

ABSTRACT This essay centers on Byron’s assimilation and deployment, as political thinker and playwright, of the ideas and dramatic techniques of the immensely influential, but now neglected, Vittorio Alfieri. The focus here is on Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. However, the essay also concentrates on P. B. Shelley and Mary Shelley, who absorbed and adapted Alfieri’s political philosophy and dramatic practices in The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Valperga. It recovers Alfieri from long-standing but superficial generalizations that have obscured and simplified the Italian for decades in discussions of British Romanticism. It introduces readers to some key Alfierian texts—a number not readily available in English—as well as some of the leading Italian commentators on these, pinpointing what particularly attracted Byron and the Shelleys to Alfieri—his conceptualization and representation of tyranny and revolution. More broadly, the essay puts its weight behind the recent “international turn” in the study of British Romanticism by pointing to the much wider international networks that can be discovered even in just these three individual British engagements with one continental writer—networks through which we directly encounter British Romanticism’s deep embeddedness in what Diego Saglia has called the “pan-European, transnational” Romanticism(s) of the post-Napoleonic era.