Events

Event Description

Emily Rohrbach: 'Keats Encounters the Shakespeare Folio'

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, books—as cultural objects and technologies of reading—were being redefined in relation to emerging forms of more ephemeral print, while a new politics of reading came into view in the context of dramatically increasing literacy rates (especially among women), the ‘industrial revolution of the book’ (Raven), and the rise of the professional writer. From this perspective, this talk will explore John Keats’s creative engagements with the spaces of the book and his own place in English literary history. It will focus especially on Keats’s encounter with his 1808 facsimile copy of the Shakespeare First Folio, as recorded in his inscription inside it of an astonishing original sonnet, as well as on his recurrent preoccupation with where one sits to read—so often figured as a ‘snug study’ in metropolitan London.  Books—and the idea of them—preoccupy Keats throughout his short life, but their place in his poetry shifts in his last few years. We'll explore the significance of that shift in relation to his ambition to be 'among the English poets' after his death.

Emily Wing Rohrbach is a Romanticist with interests in early Black Atlantic literature, aesthetics and politics, and the materiality and literary imagination of the bound book. Currently, she is Associate Professor of English, 1660-1832, at Durham University (UK), and has previously taught at the University of Manchester, Northwestern University, and (as Visiting Assistant Professor) at Hamilton College, 2006-2009. Her first book, Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (Fordham UP, Lit Z series, 2016), explored the future-oriented poetics of poetry, prose fiction, and historiography in the Romantic period. Her new book, Codex Poetics and the Politics of Romantic Reading (Cambridge UP, September 2026), reads Romantic literature at the intersection of poetics and material form to argue that Romantic writers understood 'the book' as a reading technology whose material features could help open up political possibility.