This anthology offers a broad spectrum of critical essays on John Keats by some of the well-known scholars in the USA, Canada and India. Drawn from a number of books and reputed journals in the area, published in the last fifteen years, these selections aim to cover as many works and aspects of Keats as possible. The older schools of criticism such as psychoanalytic and socio-historical are balanced by the new approaches like hermeneutic, feminist and deconstructive.

The distinctive features of Keats’ work and achievement, especially the relationship between poetry and painting, poetry and letter (“epistolary poetics”), poetry and language, and poetry healing receive scholarly attention in these essays. Also quite some of them examine the major concerns of Keats, artistic as well as personal, and their interaction in his creative work at considerable length. The variety of approaches and the sophistication of the critical discourse in these essays will hopefully stimulate fresh assessments and better appreciation of John Keats and his fascinating personality.

E. Nageswara Rao holds two research degrees and has taught at a number of Indian and American Universities for four decades. He retired as Professor of English at Osmania University, Hyderabad in the year1991.
Until recently Visiting Professor at the University of Hyderabad, Professor Rao has authored several books including Shaw the Novelist (1959), Ernest Hemingway: A Study of his Rhetoric (1983), and New Horizons in Teaching English (1992). His research papers, numbering over fifty, have appeared in widely acknowledged journals such as East-West Center Review (USA), Journal of American Studies (UK), Indian Journal of American Studies, Literary criterion and Indian Literature.


Formerly President, Indian Association for American Studies for three terms, Professor Rao is currently Vice-President of the Asian Federation of American Studies Associations, and President of the Mark Twain Society of India.

Contributors : Leon Waldoff, Daniel P. Watkins, Tilottama Rajan, Marlon B. Ross, A.A. Ansari, Donald C. Goellnicht, Cynthia Chase, Deborah Pope, Helen Vendler, R.K. Raval, Amiya Bhushan Sharma, Michael E. Holstein, Brooke Hopkins and Greg Kucich.