| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 91 === In this thesis we aim to trace how a poetics of ambivalence gradually emerges in Keats’s romances. Romance comes with its innate ambivalence, at once charming and dangerous. Throughout Keats’s career as a poet, he is continually struggling with romance, sometimes bidding it farewell, sometimes taking refuge in it. This ambivalent attitude gradually transfers from the poet to the narrative structure of his romances. Thus we will examine how, in Keats’s first major romance Endymion, he designs episodes that interrogate the main narrative of questing. Then we will see how Keats transfers his ambivalence to the female characters in his romances. In these romances, we can trace a particular narrative structure that first portrays the charm of the female character and then exposes the dangerous truth beneath her alluring surface. Finally, we will analyze how dream becomes a site of ambivalence in Keats’s romances. The ambivalent status of dreams is like a precipice. One can hope to reach higher truth yet on the risk of falling into abyss. The truth and illusion within dream serves as a structure for Keats to dramatize his ambivalence towards romance. Examining Keats’s romances and his speculation on negative capability and the Poetical Character, we suggest that Keats’s model of thinking is a continual negotiation between opposite positions. Such a model of thinking is embodied in the way how Keats’s romance tears asunder any pretension of closure and opens up a space of ever-lasting reading.
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