Victorian Keats Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire

Victorian Keats explores the ways that John Keats's poetry at once disturbed and excited his nineteenth-century readers. Keats was lambasted by Romantic and Victorian critics for his sensuousness and his 'effeminacy.' At the same time, writers identified with and imitated the 'unmanly' poet they distrusted. Najarian highlights the sexual ambiguities in Keats biography as well as authors' individual relationships to Keats in chapters on Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and Wilfred Owen. Victorian Keats shows how over time Keats came to have erotic significance for men who felt they were on the margins of sexuality and masculinity. Many of these writers came to terms with Keats's work by creating out of the 'effeminate' poet a sexual and literary ally for themselves -- a homoerotic predecessor and model.Najarian, James is the author of 'Victorian Keats Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire', published 2002 under ISBN 9780333985830 and ISBN 0333985834.