William Christie

William Christie is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Sydney, and president of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA). His publications include the play for voices, Under Mulga Wood (2004), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (2006) – awarded the NSW Premier’s Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2008 – and The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain (2009).

William Christie reviews 'John Keats: A new life' by Nicholas Roe

December 2012–January 2013, no. 347 • 28 November 2012

At Rome, aged 25, Mr. John Keats, author of a volume of beautiful poetry’, recorded the Liverpool Mercury of 30 March 1821 amongst its death notices, in what is arguably the earliest and shortest of a never-ending stream of interpretative biographies, of which this excellent one from Nicholas Roe is the latest: more than 400 pages and as many – or as few – chapters as the poet had birthdays. ... (read more)

William Christie reviews 'The Keats Brothers: The life of John and George' by Denise Gigante

April 2012, no. 340 • 01 April 2012

On the morning of 17 September 1820, a consumptive John Keats and his travelling companion and nurse, the artist Joseph Severn, boarded the 127-ton brigantine Maria Crowther bound for Italy. Ahead of them lay thirty-four days of foul weather, fouler food, and close quarters shared with another consumptive (a young girl) and a horrified matron; thirty-four days, for Keats, of agonising regret and m ... (read more)

William Christie reviews 'The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet' edited by A.D. Cousins and Peter Howarth

September 2011, no. 334 • 23 August 2011

It is a measure of the stature of William Wordsworth among his younger contemporaries that he would find himself subject to innumerable challenges over the early years of the nineteenth century. What upset the second generation of Romantic poets – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and, to some extent, John Keats – was the contrast between Wordsworth’s middle-aged political conservatism and h ... (read more)