'More,/ And still more'

: arts of excess in Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite circle

Abstract

This thesis frames an approach to Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, which attends to their work in terms of excess: that is, the ways in which they go beyond formal limitations, or cross moral lines that are either self-regulated by the text or artwork, or culturally imposed. By juxtaposing these artists and writers, it argues that the capacity of excess to articulate the limits they defy offers an insight into their resistance to the formal and cultural expectations, standards of tastes, and ethical norms that arbitrated the evolving canons of taste in the nineteenth century.

Drawing upon Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol’s distinction between ‘muchness’ and ‘too-muchness’, the thesis establishes the aesthetic overabundance of Keats’s concentrated poetics against the Pre-Raphaelites’ overwhelming visuality, in order to interrogate the thematics of enclosure in the demarcation of public and private. These boundaries are elaborated into a discussion of the moral implications of aesthetic voluptuousness through an examination of the critical reactions to Keats’s and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s overly-receptive and indulgently permissive choice and treatment of contentious subjects – conditions I term ‘indifference’. Turning then to a more theoretical understanding of excess, the thesis structures a symmetrical opposition of the limits of painting and poetry through a contrasting account of Burne-Jones’s art, in which I outline an expressive, patterned semiotic system of visuality, and Keats’s painterly poetry. Reconceiving artistic and poetic labour in terms of effort, the thesis gives a reading of Ruskin’s ideas about labour, with attention to how he uses the Pre-Raphaelites to define his moderate notion of ease between the extremes of the careless indolence of their contemporaries, against which they were rebelling, and their ‘overwork’, and evolve this into an approach to Keats’s writing with a focus on his poetic effort.

Framing an approach to the complex of aesthetic, moral and social boundaries, this thesis shows how excess offers a productive means of engaging with the transgressive, experimental and radical aspects of Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

Date of Award	6 Sept 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Stephen H Cheeke (Supervisor) & Andrew Bennett (Supervisor)