Keats and Negative Capability: (Continuum Literary Studies)

"Negative capability", the term John Keats used only once in a letter to his brothers, is a well-known but surprisingly unexplored concept in literary criticism and aesthetics. This book is the first book-length study of this central concept in seventy years. As well as clarifying the meaning of the term and giving an anatomy of its key components, the book gives a full account of the history of this idea.
It traces the narrative of how the phrase first became known and gradually gained currency, and explores its primary sources in earlier writers, principally Shakespeare and William Hazlitt, and its chief Modernist successors, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Meanwhile, the term is also applied to Keats's own poetry, which manifests the evolution of the idea in Keats's poetic practice. Many of the comparative readings of the relevant texts, including King Lear, illuminate the interconnections between these major writers. The book is an original and significant piece of scholarship on this celebrated concept.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Anatomy of Negative Capability
1. Genealogy of Negative Capability
2. King Lear and Negative Capability
3. Negative Capability and Keats's Poetry
4. Modernist Heritage of Negative Capability
Conclusion: The Tradition of Negative Capability 
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :
Li Ou is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Review :
"Elegantly written and cogently argued, this book puts the enigmatic term negative capability into clear focus for the first time and will immensely deepen our understanding of Keats' critical legacy in a way unattempted before. A brilliant tour de force to bring Keats' important concept back into scholarly debate and circulation." - Professor Zhang Longxi, Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong and Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities "Li Ou has taken Keats's most treasured critical concept and given it new and vigorous life. Not only has she provided sensitive readings of Keats's own major poems; she has singled out King Lear for a detailed analysis which illuminates both the play itself and Keats's imaginative relationship to it. Finally, in an especially revelatory chapter, she looks at Yeats and Eliot and sees ways - some of them, I think, previously unnoticed - in which 'negative capability' informs those poets also. From first to last, Li Ou's book is carefully embedded in the best scholarship of her predecessors and in her own original and perceptive understanding of the poets." - Edwin G. Wilson, Provost Emeritus, Professor Emeritus of English, Wake Forest University, USA "Li Ou has written an important and overdue book. The pendulum has swung too far: negative capability is a once-overused concept now in sore need of rehabilitation. She shows not only its vital importance in reading Keats but its considerable significance in the wider history of ideas. Well worth reading." - Simon Haines Professor of English, Chair of the Department of English, The Chinese, University of Hong Kong