Reading the Heart, Reading the World: Keats's Historiographical Aesthetic

Abstract

In view of John Keats's critique that “the nature of the world will not admit of” philosophical history's progressive temporality, this essay reads anew the relation between William Robertson's History of America and Keats's “Chapman's Homer” sonnet. Much recent criticism cites Robertson's History as Keats's historical “source” for the poem, without questioning the narrative form through which it mediates historical realities. By contrast, this essay shows how the aesthetic and formal effects of Keats's poem critique the temporal assumptions underlying the predominant narrative forms of Enlightenment historiography.

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