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An analysis of the historical nature of Keatss poetry. The most provocative controversy in Keats studies today concerns the historicity of Keatss poems. Since Jerome McGanns seminal essay Keats and the Historical Method of Literary Criticism was published in 1979, critics with new historicist leanings have debated the Victorian and New Critical canonization of Keats as an aesthete who rescued art from the contamination of time and history. However, while revealing that Keatss aestheticism is deeply embedded in the social contexts of his time, the most authoritative voices in this debate have nevertheless preserved the negative image of Keats as an aesthete by arguing that his poems attempt to retreat from the very contexts that shape them. In this comprehensive reading of Keatss major poems, Michael Sider uses the ideas of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to develop a new approach to Keatss poetry that reveals the positive nature of Keatss interaction with the competing social discourses of the Romantic period. Placing Keatss poems in dialogue with a variety of previously unexplored socioliterary contexts-a poetic dialogue about the politics of romance formed in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Rogers, and Leigh Hunt; a cultural dialogue about the temporality of epic; and an artistic debate, joined by Keats in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn, about who owns the British republic of taste-Sider uncovers Keatss active and critical response to history. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Keats, Bakhtin, and British Romanticism. Michael J. Sider is administrator of the writing program and assistant professor of English at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Sider argues persuasively that Keatss poetry takes on new interest for an historically oriented criticism when it is investigated with the critical resources made available by Bakhtins work. The overall effect of the argument is to remove Keats from the amber in which New Critical interpretations had encased him and New Historicist arguments left him to establish him as a poet in and of his time.-Prof. Don Bialostosky, Penn State University
