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This paper considers the letters and the character of Frances 'Fanny' Brawne together as a model for criticism at the present time, as well as a meaningful indication of how criticism was practiced by laypeople in the Romantic period. Focusing on Keats's great love affair rather than on Keats himself, or on Keats to the exclusion of his interlocuters, I describe the erotic conflict between Brawne and the poet as a form of agonistic engagement between writer and critic–the one tragic in impulse, the other more comic. Toward the end of the essay, I ask how conflict of this kind may be understood, in Stanley Cavell's terms, not as the ugly underside of love but as one of its most significant expressions, a way of keeping up (in Cavell's words) 'the conversation love demands'. Throughout, the essay queries the relation between criticism and love, and how that relation might contest contemporary thinking around affect and pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE AMERICAN SONNET An anthology of poems and essays DORA MALECH AND LAURA T. SMITH, EDITORS 382pp. University of Iowa Press. Paperback, $39.95. Everyone knows if you have to explain [...]

The article focuses on the concept of beauty within Enlightenment aesthetics and its intersection with racialization. Topics include Kant's ambivalent view on racial and aesthetic ideals, the influence of figures such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach on racial categories, and the specific role of Persian identity in shaping Enlightenment discourses on beauty and morality.

The article focuses on the problem of courtly love poetry, highlighting how its restraint conveys the existential terror and compensatory joy of the Middle Ages. It explores the concept of "tone" in poetry and its role in conveying social reality and historical experience, it also investigates into contemporary American poets who use a flat and recessive tone to challenge traditional notions of lyric poetry and mentions views of medievalist Hugo Kuhn.

The article reports that Literary critics know their profession, along with the humanities in general, is in trouble. What they seem less willing to admit is that their work within the university is, as Nick Mitchell puts it, 'bound in significant degree to a crisis-management function.' Until recently, the modern university system enjoyed a clearly defined, relatively well-protected social role: to disburse cultural capital and sanction class mobility.