Saturday, October 15, 2011

Denise Gigante's "The Keats Brothers"

Denise Gigante is Professor of English at Stanford University.

About her new book, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George:
John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John’s words—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George’s 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet’s most plangent and sublime poetry.... In most accounts of John’s life, George plays a small role. He is often depicted as a scoundrel who left his brother destitute and dying to pursue his own fortune in America. But as Gigante shows, George ventured into a land of prairie fires, flat-bottomed riverboats, wildcats, and bears in part to save his brothers, John and Tom, from financial ruin.
Here Gigante suggests actors for a couple of the main roles in an adaptation of the book:
I think Jake Guyllenhaal could play the role of John Keats, and (although this may sound strange it is not so for the Romantic period), his sister Maggie Gyllenhaal could play John's lover, Fanny Brawne.
Learn more about The Keats Brothers at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue