Harvard University Press Blog

"The Sage of Modern China"

Lu Xun (1881-1936), considered by many to be modern China’s most important and influential writer, was passionately engaged with the events and debates that marked the nation’s path to revolution. Though after death his legacy was mobilized by Mao and his followers—Mao himself referred to him as “the sage of modern China” —Lu Xun never joined the party. Instead, as Gloria Davies shows in Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence, he grappled with the tensions that defined his era but remained a humanist deeply committed to the ideal of empathy. Below, Gloria Davies describes Lu Xun’s profound impact on the Chinese language, and the challenge of honestly reading the work of a writer whose legacy has never not been politicized.

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My initial intention in writing Lu Xun’s Revolution was to let the essays of his last decade speak of the age in which they appeared. The more immersed in them I became, the more his language demanded continual contextualization, and the contextualization, in turn, led me inevitably to dwell on the modern Chinese sensibilities that he and his contemporaries helped to shape and define.

The result is a book that revolves around the intricacies of Chinese sense-making at a time when, under the myriad intertwined effects of war, politics and commerce, the nascent modern written vernacular, baihua, became at once creative, fluid and highly manipulable. That this language also became increasingly menaced by doctrinal utterances and slogans was a key reason for Lu Xun’s involvement in the polemics that dominated his later years. Like a large majority of educated Chinese, he saw the Communist cause as the best possible hope for a more equitable and just society at the time. However, while he professed admiration for the many true believers he befriended, whom he praised for risking life and limb on the nation’s behalf, he also loathed Communist ideologues, perceiving in them a hunger for fame and power that posed a real threat to true revolutionary change. The same ambivalence is reflected in his conspicuous avoidance of issues concerning party discipline and obedience.

Lu Xun complained that his adversaries had succeeded in wasting his time and energy “that could have been better spent on doing something of real worth.” His posthumous elevation as Mao Zedong’s revolutionary writer of choice ensured that his writings, and his characteristic defence of human empathy and intellectual independence, suffered a complicated fate. To unravel some of that complexity is an important aim of this book and all the more important because Lu Xun’s influence on the Chinese language, as it is used in the People’s Republic, is considerable.

Indeed, precisely because Lu Xun’s legacy is formidably entangled, a degree of patience on the reader’s part is essential. China’s party-state has never ceased to rely on Lu Xun as a source of moral authority, turning him into its perpetual “helper” (bangmangzhe, to recall one of his favourite disparagements). At the same time, critics of the state have also always invoked Lu Xun as an exemplary conscience. Today, disgruntled citizens are fond of quoting Lu Xun to express their own frustrations with life under one-party rule.

Perry Link on Mo Yan

The Chinese writer Mo Yan accepted the Nobel prize in literature this week in Stockholm, offering remarks that further fanned the flames of controversy surrounding his selection. After being dismissed by Salman Rushdie as a “patsy of the régime” for his failure to support the release of jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, and having his Nobel selection decried by Chinese artist and agitator Ai Weiwei as “an insult to humanity and to literature,” the author defended censorship as necessary, likening it to airport security checks.

Few observers could fail to note the contrasting responses to Mo Yan’s honor this year and to Liu Xiaobo’s in 2010, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Whereas in 2010 the Chinese government denounced and boycotted the award, this time the state has proudly received the honor, even announcing plans to spend $110 million making Mo Yan’s home village a “Culture Experience Zone.”

Some of the Chinese people, on the other hand, evince a response less warm. In a long consideration of Mo Yan’s work and Nobel recognition, Perry Link quotes the satirist Wang Xiaohong imagining Alfred Nobel’s distress:

Two years ago my people gave a prize to a Chinese, and in doing so offended the Chinese government. Today they gave another prize to a Chinese, and in doing so offended the Chinese people. My goodness. The whole of China offended in only two years.

Link, a co-editor of No Enemies, No Hatred, our recent volume of Liu Xiaobo’s writings, and author of a forthcoming inquiry into the workings of the Chinese language, An Anatomy of Chinese, outlines a series of recent statements and actions which have contributed to wide disappointment in Mo Yan’s politics. For his part, Mo Yan asks that his writing be allowed to exist apart from his extratextual political positioning. While acknowledging the complications of any such compartmentalization, Link points to the larger question of “how and to what extent a writer’s immersion in, and adjustment to, an authoritarian political regime affects what he or she writes.”

Link notes Mo Yan’s focus on society’s downtrodden, the “poor farmers who are bullied and bankrupted by local officials,” but contrasts his attention paid with that of dissident writers like Liu Xiaobo and Zheng Yi. “Liu and Zheng,” Link writes, “denounce the entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels. Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave the top out of the picture.”

Link also highlights Mo Yan’s libidinous “black humor,” the characteristic most often lauded by his supporters, but points to such writing’s usefulness to the regime for its obscuring of the past and its function as a “safety valve.” Link cites Liu Xiaobo’s 2004 article “The Erotic Carnival in Recent Chinese History,” excerpted here from No Enemies, No Hatred:

Charles Rosen (1927-2012)

After a remarkable life of playing, thinking, and writing, the great pianist and polymath Charles Rosen passed away this week at the age of 85. Our relationship with Rosen stretches back nearly twenty years, and includes the publication just months ago of Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature. The essays and reviews Rosen chose for this last book deal largely with the tension between the freedom of interpretation and the requirements of fidelity, the need to balance the necessity of respect for the “identity” of literary and musical works against our desire to be free from coercive readings. That freedom, he wrote, “provides the basis and the guarantee of the pleasures of reading, listening, and performing that justify the existence of the arts.”

What follows is excerpted from the book’s Introduction.

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We might all agree that a knowledge of the historical and biographical circumstances that saw the production of a work of literature or music or even an analytic study of them may often help us to a greater understanding and to the increase of pleasure that comes with understanding. Nevertheless, one brute fact often overlooked needs to be forced upon our consideration: most works of art are more or less intelligible and give pleasure without any kind of historical, biographical, or structural analysis. There are always some aspects of the work which do not need our critical industry or demand much interpretation. All that is necessary is just some small familiarity, acquired however involuntarily and informally by occasional experience with the stylistic language and tradition of the work.

In the end, we must affirm that no single system of interpretation will ever be able to give us an exhaustive or definitive understanding of why a work of literature or music can hold an enduring interest for us, explain its charm, account for its seduction and our admiration. A recognition of the inadequacy of any system of interpretation is essential to our being able to gain a fresh experience of the work. We need at times to acquire the talent of reading a work of literature or listening to a piece of music with innocent eye and ear, untainted or unblocked by critical studies, a state of objectivity unrealizable in all its purity, but which may be approached. Every fine work has inherent merits easily grasped across the ages and effective in alien cultures, merits that cannot always be convincingly shown to have been imposed by historical, social, or biographical pressures. At the moment of its creation, a work will have different roles to play, different functions to fulfill (some of which we ignore or deliberately set aside), and will develop still new roles and functions as it grows old and passes through history. A piece of Mozart or a poem by Pope for example, both carries and conveys a sense of the age and the society in which it was created, and yet at the same time it can speak directly to the sensibility of a modern listener who has little knowledge of the original historical context. Merely a nodding acquaintance with the style and language of the time will generally be enough, and this acquaintance may be superficial and still effective. A study of the historical conditions in which the art was created can of course deepen our understanding and make it more complex and even increase our delight, as I have remarked at the opening. But the study is rarely absolutely indispensable, the individual interpretation never exhaustive or permanent. Every critical approach is likely to obscure important aspects of a work that will enter into the experience of a naive reading, Any appreciation of the past must acknowledge that several different critical approaches are valid, and that even in the absence of any formal system of interpretation, the work may still speak to us simply through its intrinsic merit or value.

In [Freedom and the Arts], I have tried not only to benefit from a variety of different critical methods, but above all to keep in mind that listening and reading with intensity for pleasure is the one critical activity that can never be dispensed with or superseded. This will allow us to recognize the multiple possibilities of significance, and to avoid appreciating only those elements of an artistic production that are revolutionary; both Theodor Adorno and Glenn Gould, for example, were incapable of seeing that Mozart was sometimes astonishingly effective and superior to most of his contemporaries even when he was extremely conventional, not only when he was most strikingly original. And to recognize that Mallarmé, who permanently altered the nature of poetry, was nevertheless right when he claimed that he was only doing what all poets had done before him. While a study of the sources of Montaigne’s ideas will reveal his debt to the stoic, epicurean, and skeptic philosophers, only a rereading of his essays for the enjoyment of his style and his delight in contradicting himself will tell us that his conclusions are generally provisional and that the interest for the reader lies in the voyage and not in reaching the goal—or, rather, that the voyage (the demonstration of the way the mind works) was the real original goal all the time.

The freedom of interpretation is fundamental to the tradition of music and literature in the West, which continuously demanded innovation, but an innovation that would eventually—often with some difficulty and delay—be assimilated and absorbed by the tradition, which has often, indeed, more influence upon the character of the art works produced than the personal and historical circumstances at the moment of their appearance. Nevertheless, the freedom of interpretation is balanced by a requirement of fidelity—that is, that the identity of the work be preserved and remain coherent.

The Mighty, Majestic River of Persian Literature

We’ve just published Hamid Dabashi’s The World of Persian Literary Humanism, and write today to share news of a discussion of the book taking place this very evening at the Asia Society in New York. The event, which features Dabashi in conversation with Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert I. Williams Term Professor of History, will be streamed live at AsiaSociety.org beginning at 6:30pm ET, and viewers are encouraged to submit questions throughout the talk.

Dabashi’s book, one of the most ambitious on our docket this fall, presents an exploration of 1,400 years of Persian literature in order to reconceive the question of what it means to be human, which has so long been dominated by a Western perspective. He tracks the emergence and spread of Persian literary humanism (Adab) from Bengal to Istanbul, from central Asia to the eastern coasts of Africa, always with present-day Iran as its epicenter. In his own rich prose, Dabashi gives us Persian literature as a river, “mighty and majestic,” the navigation of which demands “a fluidity of narrative that comes to terms with its existential immediacy, as if it had no history, and yet is fully aware of the expansive history that it tacitly flaunts.” This river of Persian literature, he writes, is “flowing from an infinity of historical sources, comes to you with the massive volume of its abiding presence, and leads to the immortality of a yet-to-be-named sea.”

As Dabashi explains in the video below (after a long gaze on the book’s physical presentation), this is a story he’s always wanted to write:

We write the books we wish we had to read. This book, in particular, is in effect a love letter to the literary heritage that has made me—and millions of other people like me—possible. Possible, I say, in our language and diction, in the mode and abode of our being, but above all, in the cosmopolitan worldliness that is—and is made possible by—Persian literature. I have put everything I have in it. My defiance against European Orientalist traditions, against Iranian nativist historiography, and against North American comparative literary criticism, overcoming them all and thus reclaiming the magnificent worldliness of Persian literary humanism.

 

At the Asia Society’s website you can read an interview with Dabashi, and remember to tune in to AsiaSociety.org/Live this evening to join him and Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet as they ride the river of Adab.

"It's a London Thing"

“It’s a London thing,” shouts a man on a bus in the night, aping a well-known estate agent’s slogan in a piece by the young English poet Ahren Warner. The man, who’s perhaps a bit in his cups and has earned a slap from his girlfriend, is “obviously a knob,” we’re told, but a happy one.

Mark Ford, the editor of our massive new anthology, London: A History in Verse, says the shout of Warner’s man stuck in his mind as “a particularly resonant way of trying to define what it is about London poetry that makes it different from other kinds of poetry.”

It’s always got to have a London thing about it. If you’re in London, you know you’re at the center of something, and that affects the way people behave in London, and it affects the way people write about London. For good or ill, they’re at the center of something and there’s lots of other people competing in that center. So, it seemed to me that the London “thing” was what I was after as I was scouring poetry books from the 14th century—1350s, indeed—to the present day.

Ford explains more about the poetry of London, and about how he approached the task of selecting the anthology’s contents, in this short video:

 

As he lays out in the book’s Preface, Ford intended the collection to mimic the layered feel of the city itself:

The poetry of London reflects all strata of the culture of London, and an anthology such as this might be said to replicate the way so many different types of Londoner, or types of visitor to London, find themselves crammed into the same tube carriage, so to speak—that is, forced to share the contested spaces and resources of the city. The collection is arranged chronologically according to the author’s date of birth, thus allowing, I hope, a sense of the successive waves of the city’s history, as the eras leach into each other, marked, now and again, by some singular crisis or decisive event. The range of poems and authors collected here seems to me a moving and eloquent testimony to the power of London to attract and absorb and inspire and give voice to its residents, and to the power of poetry to create, layer by layer by layer, its own history of the city.

You can scan the anthology’s full table of contents on our website, or, on Facebook, scroll all the way back to the 1300s on a timeline of the included poets’ births. Also on our site, you can read one of Ford’s own poems about the city.

Aesthetic Education, for the Ethical Impulse

As we were preparing to publish Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, a memo from the book’s editor served for many of us as an introduction to this important new work. Revisiting that memo now, it’s a wonder that its movie-trailer quality had previously escaped our notice:

In a world where there are so many forces conspiring to shatter any person’s sense of having a self, the deconstruction that Spivak once championed is problem, not solution. The solution lies right where great theorists who dominated the field twenty years ago denied it lay, in teaching literature as a means of causing people to realize that they have souls.

It’s not often that we’re able to imagine our memos in voiceover, but that bit conjures a dark and dramatic film, the epic story of the last great hope for a global dystopia.

We shouldn’t make light, of course, for the world described in that memo is our own, and its depredations have inspired a radical reorientation in Gayatri Spivak’s thinking. This book, presenting essays from throughout her career in newly revised form, conveys Spivak’s renewed sense of the importance of teaching literature as “training for the ethical impulse.” As the excerpted memo above indicates, globalization now ensures that our lives are characterized by the uncertainty that Jacques Derrida, Spivak, her teacher Paul de Man, and other post-structuralists once upended the study of literature to help us see. In the twenty-first century, encountering the limits of theory, Spivak now asks: “How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living?”

This book is an attempt at such reconciliation. As the conditions of the world have changed, Spivak has over the last two decades increasingly recognized the critical importance of training in the humanities. With our increasing technological interconnections leading paradoxically to our increasing physical and emotional isolation, Spivak argues, literature and the humanities can help citizens of the world retain a sense of one another as humans. While recognizing the ways in which technology conspires against us, though, she is emphatically not a technophobe. Rather, she holds that in order to reap the benefits of new technologies we must simultaneously reimmerse ourselves in the practice of aesthetic education as developed in 18th and 19th century Europe.

We recently spoke with Spivak about An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

 

Matthew Kirschenbaum's Literary History of Word Processing

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is working on a new book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The book will explore how the adoption of word processing technology changed the way that writers practiced their craft, a project that reflects a growing scholarly interest in how writing tools affect literary output. Kirschenbaum recently gave a talk at the New York Public Library based on the book’s first chapter, which you can listen to here.

We’re excited to be publishing the book sometime in the next couple of years, and equally excited to watch it take shape along the way. And you can help! On his website, Kirschenbaum has put out a call for assistance:

I want to know who the early adopters were, and how they thought about the new digital technology in relation to their writing practice. I am interested in both “highbrow” and popular authors alike, fiction and non-fiction. I am also following the story through to the present day: many writers now have platforms on social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Some of my best information so far has come from word of mouth. That’s where I need your help. I would be very interested in hearing from:

• authors who were early adopters of computing and word prcocessing and/or social media (also authors who made a deliberate decision not to switch to a computer);
• editors, publishers, agents, and others in the business with relevant insights to contribute;
• technologists who worked on early word processing programs;
• anyone with relevant primary source materials to loan, share, or contribute; anyone who knows of interesting fictional renditions of computers and word processing (for example, King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods”).

Kirschenbaum, pictured at right, has also created a new Tumblr blog with which to document and share some of the coverage of and developments with the project. And, after Jennifer Schuessler wrote of Kirschenbaum and Track Changes in the New York Times late last month, there’s certainly been a spike in activity, with additional coverage in the Guardian and at the Atlantic Wire, and a follow-up piece by Schuessler. One notable response came from Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer and journalist who for years contributed to Byte magazine. On his own site, Pournelle took issue with many of Kirschenbaum’s statements as reported by the Times. Kirschenbaum tweeted Pournelle’s piece, noting that Pournelle was “definitely high” on his list of people to talk to, and has since reported via Tumblr that Pournelle was “much nicer on the phone” than in his written critique.

It’s interesting to see how Kirschenbaum’s research on the effects of one technological innovation—word processing—is being so shaped by his own embrace of another, social networking. Until recently, it wasn’t often that we got to watch research unfold so publicly, but Kirschenbaum’s style of transparent, internet-based process documentation is becoming more and more common, especially among practitioners of the digital humanities. Follow along for yourself via Kirschenbaum’s Tumblr or twitter, or just keeps tabs on the #trackchanges hashtag. You could also just sit back and wait for the book, but, really, where’s the change in that?

"So Overcome By Such a Trifle"

In a round-up of recent “sex novels and novellas” in last week’s New Yorker, Joan Acocella refers to a moment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion as “one of the most erotic episodes in Western literature.” In that scene, Anne Elliot is tending to an ill nephew in the presence of Captain Wentworth (a former suitor, returned), and Charles Hayter (who sees the valiant Wentworth as a threat to his station), when another nephew enters the room, bent on attention:

There being nothing to be eat, he could only have some play; and as his aunt would not let him teaze his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in such a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him—ordered, intreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.

“Walter,” said she, “get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.”

“Walter,” cried Charles Hayter, “why do you not do as you are bid? Do not you hear your aunt speak? Come to me, Walter, come to cousin Charles.”

But not a bit did Walter stir.

In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.

Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered feelings. His kindness in stepping forward to her relief—the manner—the silence in which it had passed—the little particulars of the circumstance—with the conviction soon forced on her by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks, and rather sought to testify that her conversation was the last of his wants, produced such a confusion of varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from, till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her little patient to their cares, and leave the room. She could not stay. It might have been an opportunity of watching the loves and jealousies of the four; they were now all together, but she could stay for none of it. It was evident that Charles Hayter was not well inclined towards Captain Wentworth. She had a strong impression of his having said, in a vext tone of voice, after Captain Wentworth’s interference, “You ought to have minded me, Walter; I told you not to teaze your aunt;” and could comprehend his regretting that Captain Wentworth should do what he ought to have done himself. But neither Charles Hayter’s feelings, nor any body’s feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was; and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.

To modern readers, versed in the Nicholson Bakers and Helen DeWitts that are Acocella’s real subject, it’s an exceptionally subtle scene. Which, of course, is her point in praising it.

Robert Morrison’s new annotated edition of Persuasion—from which the above passage is excerpted—presents this moment along with Charles Edmond Brock’s illustration of it, dated 1898:

In Defense of Yesterday's Papers

In her new book, On Rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks presents the results of her year-long experiment in rereading, undertaken in an attempt to understand what pleasure we gain from indulging in familiar books. Spacks, a past President of The Academy of Arts & Sciences and a National Book Award finalist, was interested in exploring how the particular joys of rereading old books can outweigh the faint guilt that attends the avoidance of all of those new and classic titles we’ve yet to read even once. She learned that the experience of rereading is intensely personal, an occasion to revisit one’s former self or selves, to balance familiar feelings with new realizations:

The dynamic tension between stability and change lies at the heart of rereading. Every renewed exchange between book and reader contains elements of both, and both provide pleasure. Our psychic needs vary, and reread books answer different needs at different times. Seeking solace, we return to a treasured children’s book. A beloved piece of light fiction answers our yearning for pure recreation. We find excitement in a rousing plot even though we already know how it will turn out; we contemplate our past as we reread something first encountered in adolescence.

On Rereading is an intensely personal book that has made many of us here at HUP consider our own rereading experiences and habits. When we sat down to record Spacks talking about the book, we couldn’t resist adding in some thoughts of our own. Take a look:

 

We’ve also been thinking about the rereading experiences of booksellers. They’re surrounded by books all day, the familiar old titles and the never-ending stream of exciting new ones that it’s their job to digest on behalf of the rest of us. If anyone should know the faint guilt of rereading, it’s booksellers. Do they even try to reread? HUP Sales Rep John Eklund, who wrote earlier this year about rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, polled a few booksellers about whether they’ve had memorable experiences rereading.

Here’s Conrad Silverberg of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company:

I first read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy in 1985 and, of course, fell in love with his elevated, almost biblical prose and complex yet readable writing style. I was, however, utterly in ignorance about anything else about the book (its historical setting or the real people he fictionalized). Now, some twenty-six years later, I am better informed (having read Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen, The War of a Thousand Deserts by Brian Delay and Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne) and can safely say that, sometimes you really do not need to be well-informed to love a book. I am loving it again for the same reasons I did the last time.

And here’s Mark Paprocki, also of Boswell Book Company:

The Life of John and George Keats

One gets a clear sense of the direction of Denise Gigante’s new book The Keats Brothers from its subtitle: The Life of John and George. That use of the singular (“life” as opposed to “lives”) is itself an argument against the standard telling of John’s life, in which George is usually cast as a mere bit player, or, worse, something of a villain. With The Keats Brothers, though, Gigante sets out to give us an understanding of a relationship that was absolutely central to John, and to the composition of some of his finest poems. In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, Christopher Benfey commends Gigante for succeeding “brilliantly.”

George Keats, two years younger than John, was swept up by the emigration fever of 1818, when many ambitious young men left England. Gigante writes of this as a moment when the modern world was coming into being, with the industrial revolution and capitalization propelling a complete reshaping of society. It was John who helped to answer the question of the role of the poet in this new modern society, and it was the entrepreneurial George who was his closest link to it, as he made his way in the U.S. Gigante’s account recreates George’s adventures, and her presentation of the rich correspondence between the brothers shows that their relationship withstood George’s absence.

In addition to being a lively story of the 19th century, The Keats Brothers is an important contribution to our appreciation of John’s poetry. As Gigante explains in an episode of the HUP Podcast (listen here), understanding the relationship between Keats and his brothers helps us to understand the haunting quality of some of the poems for which John is best remembered. His well-known odes, written with such pace in 1819, are colored by John’s sorrow over the new distance between him and George, and also by the recent death of their youngest brother Tom. The new perspective that Gigante offers here also helps readers to grasp the transatlantic context of John’s writing. 

When John died of tuberculosis and a severe pulmonary hemorrhage in 1821, at just twenty-five, George had just been back in England seeking more capital for his American ventures. He’d returned to the U.S. and didn’t learn of John’s demise until months later. John’s death is often projected onto George, and his absence at John’s end is cast as abandonment, but Gigante shows that George’s emigration had been inspired by his desire to provide for his siblings, who’d been orphaned young. Throughout The Keats Brothers, she works to show that George was far from a scoundrel, and that his life was as emblematic of the time as John’s:

However much it might jar with the traditional version of the story to suggest, the Cockney Pioneer deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company of Romanticism. While the medium of their dreams may have differed, the two eldest Keats brothers—“Man of Genius” and “Man of Power”—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism.

That bit comes from Gigante’s Prologue, where she invites her readers for an adventure on which they’ll join generations in trying to see the world through the eyes of John Keats.