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).
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)
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)