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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.
List of contents
1: Introduction.- 2: John Keats's 'Guy Hospital' Poetry, Hrileena Ghosh.- 3: The Beauty of Bodysnatching, Druin Burch.- 4: Mr Keats, Nicholas Roe.- 5: John Keats in the Context of the Physical Society, Guy's Hospital, 1815-1816, John Barndard.- 6: John Keats, The Botanist's Companion, Nikki Hessell.- 7: John Keats, Medicine and Young Men on the Make, Jeffrey Cox.- 8: Keats, Mourning and Melancholia, R.S. White.- 9: 'The feel of not to feel it': The Life of Non-Sensation in Keats, Stuart Curran.- 10: Objects of Suspicion: Keats, 'To Autumn' and Romantic Surveillance, Richard Marggraf Turley.- 11. Keats's Killing Breath: Paradigms of a Pathography.
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
“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)
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"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)
