Keats Among the Private Press Printers

Join Associate Professor from Illinois State University and co-founder of the Keats Letter Project, Brian Rejack as he talks about the private press movement in England at the end of the nineteenth century, examining what it tells us about the Victorian reception of John Keats.

While no claims can be made toward quantitative over-representation of Keats’s works in the productions of private presses like the Kelmscott Press, Doves Press, and Vale Press, Keats’s poetry is certainly reprinted in many gorgeous editions from such presses. Rejack will examine these works, showing that the aesthetic and ideological aims of private press printers align quite well with Keats’s own materialist notions of beauty, and that private press editions of Keats help to emphasize this element of his poetics through their particular bibliographic strategies.

While Rejack will focus on books from the end of the Victorian period, he will also gesture towards some examples of more recent innovative editions of Keats’s works that continue to carry elements of the fine printing movement forward into the present. 

This event is free and open to everyone. It will be recorded and added to Special Collections & Archives YouTube channel at a later date. There will be time after the talk for a Q&A which will not be recorded.