ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is founded, however, on the premise that John Keats, rather than abandon largeness altogether, repeatedly describes its involution. It draws on accounts of the burgeoning consumer culture of the early nineteenth century to demonstrate affinities among Keats's luscious settings, the goods-packed shop interiors that introduced British consumers to exotic new worlds, and the middle-class notion that a richly appointed home, however small, not only signified but engendered both psychological and financial security. The book describes the case for reading sprung rhythm as the century's densest incarnation of luscious form, in which a Keatsian-Tennysonian interchange between the aggregative and the woven appears condensed in every line. It centers around Hopkins's sonnets, where carefully woven intralinear patterns afford faith-affirming thingy retreat from a reality defined, alternately, by self-contempt, isolation, and religious doubt.
