Dorothy Van Ghent, Jeffrey Cane Robinson (Editor)
Keats: The Myth of the Hero.
Princeton University Press, 1983. First edition. 0691064377 vii/277 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in quarter red cloth and black cloth boards, with gilt and black lettering to spine. Book is like new. Dust jacket displays sunning to spine and minor scuff mark to rear spine edge. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"This work rescues from oblivion an important manuscript on Ketas by one of the best scholar/critics of fiction of the previous generation. At her death Dorothy Van Ghent, author of the acclaimed "The English Novel: Form and Function," left a critical study of Keats's work that reflected, even in its fragmentary form, her career-long involvement with his life and poetry. Jeffrey Cane Robinson has revised, reordered, and edited this material, in places summarizing Van Ghent's notes and directions. The result is an outstanding contribution to Keats criticism.
Focusing in new and thoroughgoing way on Keats's discussed in Greek myth, Professor Van Ghent finds the underlying coherence of both his poetry and his letters to be archetypes of the hero and his "double" -- pervasive myths of creation and generation reflected in his poetics of desire. With unusual analytic intensity she explores "Endymion," the "romances" "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," the love letters to Fanny Brawne, the Odes and the "Hyperion" poems, in order to view them all as stages of and modern responses to the "monomyth" of the hero."