John Keats and the Gothic Imagination

This thesis explores John Keats’s engagement with the Gothic literary aesthetic. Focusing on his last published collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems (1820), I argue that Keats is both an appreciative reader and earnest writer of the Gothic, whose approach to ‘the literature of terror’ is characterised by sensory excess. As a gesture towards the sensory quality of the ‘Keatsian Gothic’, I have structured this thesis around four of the five human senses: touch, sight, taste and sound. Throughout, I use the senses as a lens through which to examine the Gothic elements in Keats’s oeuvre. While we do not know for certain whether Keats read classic Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s novels of the 1790s, or Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), his familiarity with the conventions of the Gothic is clear from the ‘fine mother Radcliff [sic] names’ he uses for the narrative poems in the 1820 volume (letter to the George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February 1819). John Keats and the Gothic Imagination is the first sustained study of the influence of Gothic literature on Keats’s poetic imagination. As such, it is an original contribution to scholarship in the fields of both Romanticism and Gothic studies.