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The 2009 release of Bright Star, Jane Campion's film about John Keats's last years and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, engendered a range of reactions. Writing for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw contended, "The movie is vulnerable to mockery or irony from pundits who might feel that ... their appreciation of the poet exceeds that of the director. Nonetheless, I think it is a deeply felt and intelligent film, one of those that has grown in my mind on a second viewing; it is almost certainly the best of Campion's career." A. O. Scott of The New York Times and Frances Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement likewise praised Campion's focus on the end of Keats's life through the lens of his love for Brawne. As Bradshaw anticipated, however, the response from academics was considerably more circumspect. One of the most vocal critics of Bright Star was Christopher Ricks, who took issue with both the actors' voicing of Keats's poems and with Jane Campion's more general approach to dramatizing Keats's lyricism. In The New York Review of Books, Ricks singles out Campion's literal-minded approach of providing concrete visual analogs for the images invoked in Keats's poems; a film should, above all, never offer simple "pictures of the very things that a great writer has superbly--by means of the chosen medium of words alone--enabled us to imagine, to picture. A film that proceeds to furnish competing pictures of its own will render pointless the previous acts of imagination that it purports to respect or to honor. For among the accomplishments of the poet is that he or she brings it about that we see with the mind's eye, as against the eye of flesh" (46). Ricks is not saying that poetry in general, or Keats's poetry in particular, is hostile to the cinematic imagination; rather, he finds fault with Campion's use of literal visual analogs for Keats's poetic images. For her part, Campion has identified her primary source material as Keats's correspondence, rather than his poetry: "I read all the letters. I didn't read all the poems. Then I worked out a storyline" (Sullivan 87). Accordingly, during a voiceover sequence in Bright Star in which Keats (Ben Whishaw) reads from a letter he wrote to Fanny about a walk on seashore, the audience sees a shot of Whishaw standing on a beach looking at the ocean. Similarly, when Whishaw's Keats recites the sonnet "Bright Star" to Abbie Cornish's Brawne, he utters the speaker's sensation of being "pillowed on my fair love's breast" as he is, literally, resting his head on Cornish's bosom. The shortcomings Ricks describes are perhaps difficult to avoid in a film with some extremely ambitious aims. In the panel discussion on the film at the New York Public Library in September, 2009, Timothy Corrigan interpreted Campion's focus on Brawne as a "feminist intervention" even as the director also sought to introduce Keats's achievement to a mainstream, contemporary audience. Campion's dual goal of entertaining and educating reflects the ideological legacy of its producers, which were public service broadcasters from Australia (Screen Australia) and the UK (BBC films). The goal of education and entertainment has been an established part of public service broadcasting, particularly in the British commonwealth, since the earliest days (the 1920s) of the BBC under its first general director, Lord John Reith; a film about Keats would certainly seem to fall within the remit of organizations like the BBC, charged with cultivating a collective appreciation of British cultural traditions. Part of making Keats's life story and work accessible to a wide public means, for Campion, situating that work within a visual formula that straightforwardly translates imaginative transformation into concrete images. Rather than attempting to defamiliarize our experience, Campion aims to make Keats's language familiar by presenting tactile and visually knowable origins for his linguistic processing of reality. …

Michael Scrivener, Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) vii + 270 $85. Michael Scrivener's Jewish Representation in British Literature is the most encyclopedic study to date depicting Jews and Judaism during the Romantic period. Although it was once "routine" (12) to overlook representations of Jews and works by Jewish writers in literary studies, scholarship on this subject in the last twenty years has created a much different critical terrain. Yet, as Scrivener demonstrates, much work remains to be done. The sheer volume of primary texts discussed here that have been little explored, or entirely overlooked, is remarkable. In this way, Jewish Representation in British Literature will be an invaluable sourcebook for further research. Following Freudian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, Scrivener's principle analytic rubric revolves around the notion of "ambivalence." The loci for this ambivalence in this context are stereotypes about Jews; the most influential example of this phenomenon, Shakespeare's Shylock, thus expresses "Europe's conflicted views on commerce, banking, trade, usury, and capitalism" (3). Accordingly, Scrivener devotes much of his argument to discussions of common Jewish character types, with separate chapters on "the Pedlar," "the Moneylender," and "the Jew's Daughter" as these types are explored by writers of both genders across a spectrum of religious and political affiliation. Hoe these figures are deployed and interrogated during the Romantic period ultimately reflects British anxieties about the fact that "the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the era of Jewish emancipation" (208), a development which in turn necessitates far-reaching changes in the understanding of Britishness itself. The focus on stereotypes here looks back to earlier work such as Frank Felsenstein's Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 16601830 (1995) and Michael Ragussis's more recent Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (2010). Scrivener takes this emphasis in new directions by underscoring the inevitably conflicted nature of such representations, whether they are produced by Jewish or non Jewish writers. The dates indicated in the title, 1780-1840, are somewhat misleading insofar as, after a summary of recent criticism in the first chapter, chapter 2 reviews the 17th century debates over the readmission of Jews to England during Cromwell's commonwealth. This starting point helpfully allows Scrivener to outline three responses to these debates--support for readmission by a Jewish author and by a Christian one, and open hostility to readmission by another Christian --that set up the analytical parameters at work through the chapters that follow. The view that Menasseh ben Isreal is "the first Anglo-Jewish writer" is, as Scrivener himself observes, debatable, predicated as it is on Menasseh's two-year stay in London and the fact that three publications on readmission in English--two of uncertain provenance--bear his name. Menasseh spells out his reasons for seeking English residence in practical as well as spiritual terms; as Scrivener summarizes, the writer seeks "To worship freely in synagogue; (2) to advance the messianic agenda by inserting Jews where there were none; (3) to pursue commerce; (4) to join as the biblical Stranger the already existing learned and pious community of Christians" (31). But even as he counters historic slanders against Jews such as the practice of ritual murder, Menasseh ambivalently depends on other aspects of the Jewish stereotype in order to argue for readmission. Christian assumptions about predatory Jewish lending are reshaped into a useful knowledge about business; fears of Jewish violence against Christians are recast into a desire for Christian camaraderie. Unfortunately, as Scrivener's analysis demonstrates, this approach did not preclude rhetorical violence in return by the anti-readmission pamphleteer William Prynne, whose A Short Demurrer to the Jewes Long Discontinued Remitter into England (1655) buttresses virulent Anti-Semitism with meticulous, supposedly historical detail as to specific Jewish crimes. …