Corresponding with Keats: A Tragedy in Five Acts
Submission Type
Event
Faculty Advisor
Michael Theune
Expected Graduation Date
2020
Location
Room E103, Center for Natural Sciences, Illinois Wesleyan University
Start Date
4-4-2020 11:30 AM
End Date
4-4-2020 11:45 AM
Disciplines
Education | English Language and Literature
Abstract
In recent decades, key scholarship and projects have affirmed—at long last—the importance and independent literary quality of John Keats’s personal correspondence. And while creative endeavors like Tom Clark’s Junkets on a Sad Planet have further engaged Keats’s remarkable letters, none have gone so far as to audaciously assume a personal acquaintanceship with the long-dead Romantic. Uniquely processing a personal trauma which echoes Keats’s biography in numerous, intriguing ways, Corresponding with Keats: A Tragedy in Five Acts does just that. Communicating a semi-autobiographical narrative via a prose-poem and accompanying analytical reflection, this project uses Keats’s letters—specifically, his lengthy September, 1819, journal letter to George and Georgiana Keats—as a template and, with the necessary casualness of someone who has—in reality—voyeuristically probed the writer’s many revealing letters, is addressed directly, intimately, and improbably to John Keats himself.
Corresponding with Keats: A Tragedy in Five Acts
Room E103, Center for Natural Sciences, Illinois Wesleyan University
In recent decades, key scholarship and projects have affirmed—at long last—the importance and independent literary quality of John Keats’s personal correspondence. And while creative endeavors like Tom Clark’s Junkets on a Sad Planet have further engaged Keats’s remarkable letters, none have gone so far as to audaciously assume a personal acquaintanceship with the long-dead Romantic. Uniquely processing a personal trauma which echoes Keats’s biography in numerous, intriguing ways, Corresponding with Keats: A Tragedy in Five Acts does just that. Communicating a semi-autobiographical narrative via a prose-poem and accompanying analytical reflection, this project uses Keats’s letters—specifically, his lengthy September, 1819, journal letter to George and Georgiana Keats—as a template and, with the necessary casualness of someone who has—in reality—voyeuristically probed the writer’s many revealing letters, is addressed directly, intimately, and improbably to John Keats himself.