As the essays in this volume reveal, Keats’s places could be comforting, familiar, grounding sites, but they were also shifting, uncanny, paradoxical spaces where the geographical comes into tension with the familial, the touristic with the medical, the metropolitan with the archipelagic. Collectively, the chapters in Keats’s Places range from the claustrophobic stands of Guy’s Hospital operating theatre to the boneshaking interior of the Southampton mail coach; from Highland crags to Hampstead Heath; from crowded city interiors to leafy suburban lanes. Offering new insights into the complex registrations of place and the poetic imagination, the contributors to this book explore how the significant places in John Keats’s life helped to shape an authorial identity.

“The essays in this ranging and enlightening volume remind us that, however freely his imagination roamed, Keats remained, always, locally attached, and anchored in the living and breathing reality of the world in which he lived.” (Chris Townsend, The BARS Review, Vol. 55, 2020)

Richard Marggraf Turley is Professor of Romantic Literature at Aberystwyth University, UK. He is author of several books on the Romantic poets, including Keats’s Boyish Imagination (2004), Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (2009), and with Jayne Archer and Howard Thomas, Food and the Literary Imagination (2015). He is also author of a novel set in 1810, The Cunning House (2015). In 2007, he won the Keats-Shelley Prize for poetry.