Keats and Scepticism

Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
	Keats’s sceptical poetics
	The term ‘scepticism’
	Romantic scepticism
	Structure of this book
1 Keats and Pyrrhonian scepticism: Sextus Empiricus
	Sceptic: non-dogmatic and investigative
	Scepticism: definition and key elements
	Sextus, Keats, and medicine
	Sceptical language and sceptical poetics
	Keats’s self-reflexive sceptical poetics in Lamia
2 Keats and Renaissance scepticism: Montaigne
	Montaigne’s inheritance of Pyrrhonian scepticism
	Montaigne’s development of Pyrrhonian scepticism
	Keats and Montaigne: affinitive ideas
	Keats’s sceptical ‘essays’: the 1819 spring odes
	Montaigne in the Keats circle
	Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Hamlet
	Keats and Hamlet
	Intersection of Keats, Hamlet, and Montaigne
3 Keats and Enlightenment scepticism: Voltaire
	Voltaire, Keats, and Keats’s circle
	Voltaire’s scepticism in Dictionnaire philosophique
	Voltaire’s historiography and Hyperion
	Voltaire’s ‘conte philosophique’ and Isabella
4 Keats and Enlightenment scepticism: Hume
	Hume, Keats, and Hazlitt
	Hume’s scepticism about our understanding of the external world and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’
	Hume’s scepticism about our notion of the self and King Stephen
	Excessive scepticism and The Fall of Hyperion
	Temperate scepticism in ‘To Autumn’
Afterword
Index