Keats, Narrative and Audience

This original study offers clear but conceptually sophisticated readings of Keats's major poems, informed by contemporary literary theory. The book focuses on the relationship between narrative in Keats's poetry and its audience and readers, while also developing a theory of reading for Romantic poetry more generally.

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Andrew Bennett's original study of Keats focuses on questions of narrative and audience as a means to offer new readings of the major poems. It discusses ways in which reading is 'figured' in Keats's poetry, and suggests that such 'figures of reading' have themselves determined certain modes of response to Keats's texts. Together with important new readings of Keats's poetry, the study presents a significant rethinking of the relationship between Romantic poetry and its audience. Developing recent discussions in literary theory concerning narrative, readers and reading, the nature of the audience for poetry, and the Romantic 'invention' of posterity, Bennett elaborates a sophisticated and historically specific reconceptualization of Romantic writing.