Keats and Women

• Main Authors: Chia-Rong Wu, 吳家榮
• Other Authors: Eric Kwan-Wai Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/86948787072417818153

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 創作與英語文學研究所 === 91 === Abstract This thesis examines John Keats's relations with real-life women, the female figures in his works, and his feminine or androgynous poetic style. In Keats's times, critics like Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt already noticed Keats's feminine traits. More recent scholarships have attended to Keats's relationship with women (particularly the“blue stockings”and the women readers) and female figures in his poetry. Several famous scholars have discussed sexual ambiguity in Keats. Other critics have attempted to classify Keats's female characters. I myself try to read Keats's protean female figures as the projection of his desires for and anxieties toward women. I have gone beyond Keats's text to explore his real-life relations with women, especially his mother and his lover Fanny Brawne. Proceeding from women to female figures, I move from biographical-psychological studies to image studies and the investigation of poetic style, making use of the insights from recent critical works concerned. This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One accounts for Keats's relations with the important women of his life. Chapter Two traces Keats's poetic psyche in the early phase of his poetic career, paying particular attention to how the young Keats apotheosizes his women figures. Chapter Three takes into account Keats's four major love poems: Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes,“La Belle Dame sans Merci,”and Lamia. The four significant female figures, Isabella, Madeline, La Belle Dame, and Lamia, are examined in depth. Chapter Four deals with the female figures in Keats's epic poems, including Endymion and the Hyperion poems. The final chapter focuses on the feminine and androgynous figures in Keats's Great Odes, exploring the allegorical or symbolic dimension concerned. This comprehensive study of Keats and women is probably the first of its kind in Taiwan.