Keats and Scepticism

Li Ou, PhD in English (Literary Studies), the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is Associate Professor in the Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Keats and Negative Capability (2009), ‘Keats, Sextus Empiricus, and Medicine’ (Romanticism 22:2 (2016), 167-76), ‘Keats’s Afterlife in Twentieth-Century China’ (English Romanticism in East Asia: A Romantic Circles PRAXIS Volume, 2016), ‘Romantic, Rebel, and Reactionary: The Metamorphosis of Byron in Twentieth-Century China’ (British Romanticism in Asia, 2019), ‘Two Chinese Wordsworths: The Reception of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China’ (Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts, Routledge, 2019), and ‘Keats, Montaigne, and Hamlet’ (East-West Dialogues: The Transferability of Concepts in the Humanities, 2021). Her research interests include Romantic poetry, especially that of Keats, and cultural/literary relations between Greater China and Britain.

Introduction

Keats’s sceptical poetics

The term ‘scepticism’

Romantic scepticism

Structure of this book

Chapter One Keats and Pyrrhonian Scepticism: Sextus Empiricus

Sceptic: non-dogmatic and investigative

Scepticism: definition and key elements

Sextus, Keats, and Medicine

Sceptical language and sceptical poetics

Keats’s self-reflexive sceptical poetics in Lamia

Chapter Two Keats and Renaissance Scepticism: Montaigne

Montaigne’s inheritance of Pyrrhonian scepticism

Montaigne’s development of Pyrrhonian scepticism

Keats and Montaigne: affinitive ideas

Keats’s sceptical ‘essays’: the 1819 spring odes

Montaigne in the Keats circle

Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Hamlet

Keats and Hamlet

Intersection of Keats, Hamlet, and Montaigne

Chapter Three Keats and Enlightenment scepticism: Voltaire

Voltaire, Keats, and Keats’s circle

Voltaire’s scepticism in Philosophical Dictionary

Voltaire’s historiography and Hyperion

Voltaire’s conte philosophique and Isabella

Chapter Four Keats and Enlightenment scepticism: Hume

Hume, Keats, and Hazlitt

Hume’s scepticism about our understanding of the external world and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’

Hume’s scepticism about our notion of the self and King Stephen

Excessive scepticism and The Fall of Hyperion

Temperate scepticism in ‘To Autumn’

Afterword