In this consistently illuminating and original book Porscha Fermanis places Keats within the history of ideas, persuasively offering us a poet-thinker whose response to the great writers of the Enlightenment was both informed and sympathetic. In a scholarly and thoughtful account, she presents fresh and invigorating readings of the great narrative poems, inviting us to re-consider our normal assumptions about Romanticism and its relationship with eighteenth century thought. John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment is a substantial contribution to our growing sense of the historical Keats. -- Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford Porscha Fermanis argues persuasively for a reassessment of Keats's relationship with Enlightenment ideas. In cogent, lucid, and well-informed readings of Keats's longer poems, she provides a creatively enabling sense of what the Enlightenment was and meant to the poet. Keats may have mistrusted aspects of rationalist or progressivist thought, but Porscha Fermanis shows how profoundly his poems engage with the Enlightenment 'science of man'. Offering an original perspective from which to think about the poet's thought, John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment is an impressive and important achievement. -- Michael O'Neill, Durham University In this consistently illuminating and original book Porscha Fermanis places Keats within the history of ideas, persuasively offering us a poet-thinker whose response to the great writers of the Enlightenment was both informed and sympathetic. In a scholarly and thoughtful account, she presents fresh and invigorating readings of the great narrative poems, inviting us to re-consider our normal assumptions about Romanticism and its relationship with eighteenth century thought. John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment is a substantial contribution to our growing sense of the historical Keats. Porscha Fermanis argues persuasively for a reassessment of Keats's relationship with Enlightenment ideas. In cogent, lucid, and well-informed readings of Keats's longer poems, she provides a creatively enabling sense of what the Enlightenment was and meant to the poet. Keats may have mistrusted aspects of rationalist or progressivist thought, but Porscha Fermanis shows how profoundly his poems engage with the Enlightenment 'science of man'. Offering an original perspective from which to think about the poet's thought, John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment is an impressive and important achievement.