Modernism has always been a confusing and disputed term. In architecture it has been used to describe a design strategy based on rationality and functional analysis, such as those found in industrial architecture in the United States or in the Bauhaus projects of Germany, and it is most often distinguished from a vague ‘traditionalism’ that was its predecessor, and an equally ill-defined postmodernism that succeeded it. In music modernism refers most often to those composers who broke with the conventions of tonality and recognisable rhythmic patterns and structures, introducing instead musical style marked by dissonance, discontinuity, fragmentation and experimentation in sound and form. In dance the notion of modernism has been employed in connection with twentieth-century practitioners whose work reflected themes of contemporary life, but also with dance that focused on movement and form inherent in the human body. In pictorial art we find modernism emerging as a break with traditional and academic styles; in its incipient years it often served as commentary on social life, but as it developed, it came to explore visual representation as such, rather than any specific subject or topic. Literary scholars have most often viewed modernism as part of a reaction to both historical changes in the social order and aesthetic imperatives inherited from the nineteenth century, in particular those adopted by classicists and realists. Literary modernism eventually seems to reject representation as an artistic exigency, resorting instead to experimentation in forms and with words, although it often does not wish to relinquish an impact on readers. It is difficult to determine precisely what unites these various forms of modernism, but one suspects that if a unifying principle does exist, it is to be located in a specifically European consciousness that emerged in the late nineteenth century and continued into the decades of the next century.

The “story” of Keats - how a young man of no apparent distinction in family or social origins, education, or early accomplishments, grew up to become one of the ten or twelve most admired poets in all of English literature - is really several stories, some of them not entirely consistent or compatible with some of the others.1 This chapter focuses on two. The first is the story of Keats the young genius whose life and career were cut short - some said by the hostility of reviewers - just as he was about to produce the major works that his friends thought him capable of. This is the Keats of Shelley's Adonais; of Byron's famous quip in Canto 11 of Don Juan that Keats's “mind, that very fiery particle,” was “snuffed out by an article”; and of the inscriptions on his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome: the broken lyre symbolizing unfulfilled aspirations; the words that the poet himself requested, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”;and his friends' well-meant embellishments mentioning the poet's “bitterness [. . .] of heart, at the malicious power of his enemies.” The product of this first “story” is the Keats whom the British public thought of, if they remembered him at all, during the first three decades following his death on 23 February 1821.

Among Keats's contemporaries Byron has a distinctive place. His astonishing public success, his close connections with Leigh Hunt, his recurrently negative and snobbishly sarcastic or condescending judgments of Keats's writing - these and other related factors make Byron's dismissiveness of Keats a painful thing to contemplate. We should be wary, though, of dismissing Byron's dismissiveness. The reasons for, and terms of, his animus against Keats's verse reveal much that is important about Keats's career and his talent - and much about Byron as well. Even the relatively sympathetic and praising remarks he made soon after Keats's death are worth more curiousminded attention than they have received, not least because, in the end, Byron returns to a mainly negative stance. His latest known comment is in a letter to John Murray, 10 October 1822. As usual, and tellingly, the immediate context is Hunt and the Cockney-Suburban School: “I do not know what world [Hunt] has lived in - but I have lived in three or four - and none of them like his Keats and Kangaroo terra incognita - .” The Hampstead world of Keats and Hunt may as well have been a penal colony down under, populated by transported Cockneys, for all Byron cares to know of it. Or so he says to his old Tory publisher.

For Marxist critics, the way literature makes meaning out of the arrangement of words or the telling of life stories contributes to the way ruling groups maintain their power in society. In this light, a play like King Lear might be understood as not only telling a tragic tale of family betrayal but also promoting a vision of the world that would help assure the domination of the aristocracy in late Renaissance England. Marxist critics have also been interested in the way literature challenges unjust social arrangements and displays through its refractive mirror of history the weaknesses and fissures that make unjust social arrangements unstable and prone to radical transformation. For example, even as King Lear argues for aristocratic hegemony, the work demonstrates precisely those problems and social contradictions that would make inevitable the downfall of the aristocracy in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Marxism assumes that labour, broadly defined by Marx as human constructive activity on the world, is an essential and defining characteristic of human life. But, according to Marx, human labour is alienated under capitalism. The products of labour are taken from the producers and sold for a profit that benefits the capitalist class but not the workers. The intention of Marxism as a political project is to restore to workers control over what they produce so that the benefits accrue to them and not to a class of owners.

That step is impeded by force as well as by what Marx calls ‘ideology’. All societies in which power and wealth are unequally divided and which depend on the subordination of one group to another require a set of ideas and cultural practices that license the existing inequalities by making them seem rational or natural or divinely sanctioned.

At the root of “allusion” is the verb “to play” (from the Latin, “ludere”). A calling into play is not the same as referring to or mentioning, and it need not be covert or indirect. Like other poets, Keats sometimes puts his allusion in direct quotation:

Keats follows Twelfth Night. Or, What You Will. With any allusion, the play's the thing (wherein I'll catch the conscience and the consciousness). The concept of allusion and its application ask to be flexible, as with the due amount of play in any steering wheel.

Keats alludes to mythology, history, topical circumstance, and so on; this essay attends to the calling into play of the words or phrases of a previous writer. An allusion predicates a source (no coincidence); but identifying a source is not the same as postulating an allusion, for a source is not necessarily called into play by its beneficiary. What goes to the making of a poem does not necessarily go to its meaning. Sometimes readers will disagree as to whether a line of Keats had its source in, say, Hamlet; sometimes, they may agree that such was a source but disagree as to whether he was alluding; and often readers will disagree as to just what they should make of what Keats made of that which he alluded to. This, not because in criticism anything goes, but because much goes. Poems have a way of being undulating and diverse.

Literary criticism and philosophy of science might appear to have few interests in common. After all, the main concern of philosophy of science – at least on one fairly standard conception – is to offer a justificatory account of how scientific theories achieve progress by providing an ever more detailed descriptive and depth-explanatory knowledge of physical objects, processes and events. Ideas may differ as to just how this should be done, whether (for example) through a ‘top-down’ method which seeks to derive empirical predictions from high-level covering-law statements or – conversely – through a ‘bottom-up’ inductive approach which starts out from the empirical data and treats them as the basis for constructing theories of the widest generality and scope. There are many other fundamental issues on which philosophers of science divide, among them the question (first raised by Hume) as regards the validity of inductive arguments in whatever form and the problem of justifying causal explanations (or appeals to putative ‘laws of nature’) which necessarily transcend the limits of observed regularity or Humean ‘constant conjunction’. So philosophy of science is far from presenting a united front in these matters. All the same it may be thought that such issues are worlds apart from the kinds of concern that typically preoccupy literary critics and theorists. For them, what counts is not so much a theory's truth or explanatory power but rather its capacity to capture certain salient aspects of our subjective reponse to literary works, or perhaps – in formalist terms – its ability to locate certain salient attributes of poetic or narrative structure. Such approaches may be thought to give criticism a more ‘scientific’ status, that is, a claim to utilise methods which emulate those of the physical sciences rather than appealing to the vagaries of mere individual reader-response. But there is still a fairly obvious sense in which literary theory – unlike philosophy of science – has to do with matters of cultural-linguistic or interpretative understanding where such scientific models would seem to have limited applicability

In the opening chapter of The Long Revolution (1961), Raymond Williams argues that ‘[e]verything we see and do, the whole structure of our relationships and institutions, depends, finally, on an effort of learning, description and communication’. In what was to become a radical challenge to the dominant modes of literary and cultural study, Williams concluded that:

Williams goes on, in his chapter on ‘The Analysis of Culture’, to challenge an historical methodology based upon the assumption that ‘the bases of society, its political, economic, and “social” arrangements, form the central core of facts, after which the art and theory can be adduced, for marginal illustration or “correlation”’, and a literary methodology which privileged its own formal laws of composition while relegating this central core of facts to the status of ‘background’. His call in 1961 was for a cultural history which had to be ‘more than the sum of the particular histories, for it is with the relations between them, the particular forms of the whole organisation, that it is especially concerned’. Thus, Williams’ ‘theory of culture’ could subsequently be defined as ‘the study of the relationships between elements in a whole way of life’.

Fascist aesthetics – more precisely, aesthetics informed by fascist conceptions of nation, society and human essence – is intricately and insidiously bound up with twentieth-century critical thought. This chapter discusses the origins and significance of fascist elements in twentieth-century criticism and aesthetics. It offers an analysis of theories of art expressive of, or simply receptive to, fascist ideology, taking the Belgian national context as a case study in the growth, diffusion and cultural resonance of fascist ideas.

The concept of fascism

The term ‘fascism’ derives its force from an incongruous yet potent mixture of novelty and imprecision. Arriving on the scene in 1919, Mussolini's Fascismo styled itself as a decisive tear in the mottled purple fabric with which liberal, conservative and socialist ideologies failed to cover the expanse of the political; it rapidly attained the status of a viable ideological alternative backed up by a distinct political force whose ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922 made it the first fascist movement ‘autonomously to “seize” power’. ‘Fascism’ has retained its significance as the name for a distinct, radically new political phenomenon, notwithstanding the semantic confusion wrought through its use as a generic term. Paradoxically, the generic term ‘fascism’ still has the performative power of a proper name, despite, on the one hand, its loose usage as a catch-all label for ‘right-wing’ or even just generally ‘unpleasant’ ideological beliefs, and, on the other hand, the numerous exercises in terminological hygiene seeking to distinguish between the dubious privilege of the proper name and the generic features constituting the ‘fascist minimum’.

In October 1817 Blackwood's ”Z.”launched a notorious attack on what he christened “The Cockney School of Poetry.”“Cockney” was (and still is) a name for anyone born within the sound of Bow Bells in the City of London, but Z. expanded the definition:

In Z.'s anatomy, a “Cockney” lacked taste and education but was full of “vulgar”pretension. The term was a class slur by which the well-educated Tories portrayed their liberal counterparts as ill-bred social climbers. Its most important aspect by far, especially in the case of Keats, was poetic manner. This essay examines “Cockney style” and traces Keats's shifting, and problematic, relation to it.

Old and new historicisms

Recent critiques of historical methodology have inaugurated a radically revised understanding of art, culture and society. Literary criticism has been at the forefront of these developments, an especially articulate advocate of their utility and their timeliness. The innovations of this new historicism, though, are bound to recapitulate old historicisms to some extent. In the heat of critical reaction to what went before, pioneers are inclined at first to neglect still earlier precursors of their own interpretative practice. Opponents of new historicism are, of course, quick to attack its claims to newness. In so doing, though, their criticism itself becomes historicist, one which historicises the historicisers. Historicism ought therefore to welcome their corrections. Indeed, the stage that historicist criticism has now reached is one which is keen to become more learned in past attempts to depart from a purely linear account of history, a chronology, in order to detect the art of historiography at work. An analysis of its rhetoric has thus become increasingly important. The tropes history uses, the choices it makes between the different kinds of available narrative, the realism which concerns of the present can bestow on supposedly correlative movements of the past are considered part of history's content. Critical fashion, in other words, may be historically informative, and the most critical aspect of historicism concerns the question of whether past and present concerns are so inextricable that they are in fact troping each other. Hayden White, in his immensely influential book Metahistory, found his major precedents for this historical self-consciousness in nineteenth-century German historical method. The following chapter acknowledges earlier anticipations of current historicism while seeking to do justice to the idioms which it typically draws on now.

To read the public dimension of Keats's early poetry, particularly the pieces published in periodicals such as Leigh Hunt's Examiner and then gathered into the 1817 Poems, is not only to experience the stirrings of power unleashed in the poems of 1819-20 but also to recover a more pronounced public and political register than some later works would suggest. This chapter, without promoting public or political over personal and aesthetic intentions, shows how brilliantly Keats could join these interests.

Keats in The Examiner

Keats’s public career begins with Leigh Hunt’s essay, “Young Poets,” in his weekly reform-minded newspaper, The Examiner, which quoted in full the sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1 December 1816). Hunt, the editor, injected Keats (along with Shelley and J. H. Reynolds) into an arena of political controversy: fresh from two years in prison for “libeling” the Prince Regent, he was undaunted in his attacks on Tory corruption, and not shy about enlisting his literary enthusiasms to the cause. In the language of a manifesto, Hunt promotes this new “school of poetry” to “extinguish the French one that has prevailed among us since the time of Charles the 2nd”: the neoclassical “school” of order and decorum favored by the Tory establishment and epitomized by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), whose poetry was virtually synonymous with the well measured “heroic couplet,” whose recurring models of style and decorum were the court and aristocratic culture, and whose brilliance, wit, and range of accomplishment were such that the first half of the eighteenth century was regarded as the “Age of Pope.”

‘Always historicise!’ Fredric Jameson famously wrote, adding that this was ‘the one absolute and we may even say “transhistorical” imperative of all dialectical thought’. It is indeed a requirement one would expect anyone committed to Marx's theory of history to observe when studying cultural products. The most natural way of interpreting that theory implies that these products are, quite simply, unintelligible unless placed within the broader set of historically contingent social relationships from which they emerged. But how to historicise without causing the text to vanish into its historical context? This difficulty is especially acute when questions pertaining to the formal construction of the text are under consideration. Marx and Engels acquired from Hegel a hostility to divorcing form and content: ‘the form is the indwelling process of the concrete content itself’, as the latter put it. But – once again – how to demonstrate that form is part of the process without sub– jecting it to the contingencies of historical specificity?

Literary theory did not, of course, figure high among the concerns of the founders of historical materialism. In his most celebrated statement of that theory, Marx contrasted the productive forces and the relations of production, which together formed the ‘real foundation’ of social life, with ‘the legal and political superstructure’ developing from that base: ‘it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’.

Keats composed his first ode early in 1815, while an apprentice surgeon-apothecary. Addressed to Apollo, it imagines bards singing in the western sky, Shakespeare and Milton among them, their lyres strung with the rays of the setting sun. In the next five years he wrote eleven more, of which five, the so-called “Great Odes” of 1819, stand among the most celebrated in English: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn. But what is - and was - an “ode”?

“I’d like all suchlike odes there’ve ever been, binned by a truly democratic nation.” This reaction to the possibility, in 1999, of a Poet-Laureate ode should be compared with John Aikin’s claim, in 1772, that the “modern ode” displays “the boldest flights of poetical enthusiasm, and the wildest creations of the imagination, and requires the assistance of every figure that can adorn language and raise it above its ordinary pitch.” Both comments, political and aesthetic, apply to the ode as Keats knew it, a contradictory genre that came, like the ancient artifact it is, not only with a distinct “attitude” but also, as Stuart Curran reminds us, a “fully realized literary history.” Its principal formal variants (the strict Pindaric, the stanzaic Horatian, and the irregular) had been mastered by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others; all remained working options for Keats and his generation. And yet the inherent paradoxes of the form were particularly obvious at this point in its history. Traditionally dedicated to the celebration of an external object, the ode and its characteristic figures, apostrophe and personification, were frequently read self-reflexively, as bravura displays of visionary imagination.

The input to critical theory from so-called ‘continental’ (principally French and German) philosophy is well known and well documented. A somewhat less well known, less widely acknowledged, philosophical contribution to theoretical accounts of literature and criticism comes from ‘analytic philosophy’. Nevertheless, there is a substantial body of work from the analytic tradition in what has come to be known as ‘philosophy of literature’ and it is by no means confined to the English-speaking world. This essay will map out this contribution and assess its significance.

Analytic philosophy and related movements

The very idea of ‘analytic philosophy’ is contested and resists uncontroversial definition. Philosophers as different as Gottlob Frege and G. E. Moore, Rudolf Carnap and J. L. Austin, W. V. O. Quine and P. F. Strawson, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations have been called ‘analytic’ and it is hard to speak with confidence of common definitive elements. Nor is the epithet ‘Anglo-American’ (in contrast to ‘continental’) especially apt as leading figures, such as Frege, Wittgenstein, Friedrich Waismann, Moritz Schlick and other members of the Vienna Circle, came from Continental Europe. Other designations are sometimes used interchangeably with ‘analytic philosophy’, notably ‘linguistic philosophy’, ‘ordinary language philosophy’, even ‘philosophy of language’, but again only confusion results from running these together.

Introduction

The specific and identifiable movement in literary criticism which might be referred to as ‘literature and theology’, or ‘literature and religion’, developed in western Christian cultures during the second half of the twentieth century. This is not to claim that there are no other, equally important approaches to the relationship between religious discourses and works of literature, or that such relationships cannot fruitfully be explored in non-Christian contexts. Neither is it to obscure the extent to which Christian interpretive practice has been questioned and complicated in encounters with other traditions. It is merely to observe that a set of theological discourses are historically and culturally interwoven with literary criticism in the Christian west, and that this coalescence has shaped a discernible critical movement in the last fifty or sixty years.

I would argue that the peculiar relationship between the study of literature and Christian theology in the west is a context coterminous with what Jacques Derrida refers to as the theological age of the linguistic sign: in Christian cultures, language has been thought to encode the divine sanction implied in the creation of the world by the Word or logos: ‘God said “Let there be …” And there was …’ In this epoch, the combining of theos and logos in its very name predisposes theology toward the study of language, and literary criticism towards theology. The deconstruction of ‘logocentric’ modes of thought (i.e., those discourses which seek to provide texts with fixed, determinate meanings) raises questions of particular difficulty for critical practices which incorporate a religous lineage and commitment.

When T. S. Eliot cited Ode to a Nightingale for the “impersonal” art that he esteemed over the Wordsworthian effect of “personality,” he was repeating Keats's own favoring of a “poetical Character” that, unlike “the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” presented “no self [. . .] no Identity”(KL 1.386-87). This value would become the New Critical standard of “objective” poetic form, for which Keats's Great Odes provided textbook models. It is thus remarkable to see this hallmark Keatsian effect so starkly subverted by poems he wrote after these odes, from late 1819 to early 1820: “The day is gone,” “I cry your mercy,” “What can I do?,” “Physician Nature, ” a revision of “Bright Star,” and an enigmatic fragment, “This living hand” - all inspired, or haunted, by Fanny Brawne. Desperately in love, despairing of success as a poet, struggling financially and in failing health, with no aim of publication, Keats still turned to poetic form to grapple with a passion, so he told her, that he knew had turned him “selfish,”that is, self-occupied (KL 2.123; 223).

Post-colonial theory or post-colonialism can be said to have been inaugurated with the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978. This seminal work heralded a revolution in the field of literary studies. It shows how no form of intellectual or cultural activity is innocent of power hierarchies, highlighting the collusion between literary representation and colonial power. Orientalism demonstrates how every branch of knowledge, scientific as well as that broadly denoted ‘the humanities’, is not merely tinged with, but part and parcel of, the establishment of European political hegemony through the process of colonial conquest and domination. However, it is the stress on the literary text that has marked out and at the same time circumscribed, the field of post-colonial studies.

In the two decades since the publication of Orientalism, post-colonialism has developed into a sprawling academic discipline. Its purview has expanded and in its examination of the power/knowledge nexus, post-colonialism has ranged over a wide variety of subjects, including the history of colonial conquests, of anti-colonial struggles, the exigencies of post-colonial nation formations and the politics of cultural domination. In geographical terms, it covers the whole world, examining the cultural ramifications of political and economic domination. Historically, it had begun by looking at post-colonial periods, after the process of colonisation had started, that is from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and thus was part of the deconstructive questioning of the European Enlightenment. More recently, post-colonial scholars have begun to delve further back in time and, in a healthy partnership with new historicism, are now examining the process of Renaissance self-fashioning, as it pertains to travel and the ‘discovery’ of ‘new lands’.

We read Endymion with a sharp awareness of its role in the fashioning of Keats. He himself described it as a rite of passage: a “test, a trial of my Powers of Imagination and chiefly of my invention [. . .] by which I must make 4000 Lines of one bare circumstance and fill them with Poetry”; a “[leap] headlong into the Sea” (KL 1.169-70, 374). For most readers, the thrill and tedium of reading Endymion - and the mixture of affection and irritation one feels for it - are linked to this sense of it as a young poet's testing ground: the biographical figure seems revealed in his preciosity, his ambition, his absorption, his overweening love of “fine Phrases” (KL 2.139), and his trying lapses of taste and judgment. The most influential analyses have acknowledged its critical place in Keats's poetic development: “In working out the destiny of his hero,” writes Stuart Sperry, Keats “was in fact working out his own.”