Abstract
Almost two centuries have passed since John Keats’s death, and yet he is very much with us today. This chapter examines the role of ideas of ‘friendship’ in the construction of Keats’s ongoing ‘afterlife’ beginning with the poet’s circle of friends, and explores how reading, writing and friendship color each other in the formation of a general Romantic culture of commemoration. It is argued that Keats’s poetry and poetics, as well as his friends’ and admirers’ posthumous care for his image, negotiate a set of tensions central to his afterlife all along: tensions between publicity and intimacy, mediation and immediacy, and between the body and the book. The chapter asks what ‘friendship’ as a category of analysis adds to discussions of literary celebrity and ‘afterlife’.
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Eisner, E. (2016). A Friendly Return of the Author: John Keats (1795–1821). In: Franssen, G., Honings, R. (eds) Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55868-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55868-8_2
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