Language, Cognition, and Emotion in Keats’s Poetry

Language, Cognition, and Emotion in Keats's Poetry applies an innovative cognitive linguistic approach to the poetry of John Keats, the first of its kind to employ a cognitive-based framework to explore the expression and articulation of emotion in his work.

Brannon adopts an embodied perspective to emotion, rooted in cognitive linguistics, cognitive grammar, and cognitive poetics but also works from figurative language and stylistics, in examining a selection of Keats's poems. This approach allows for a close interrogation of the texts themselves but also the languages that compose them, comprising lexical and grammatical elements, which, when taken together, bring out the emotional saliency of Keatsian poetry. While revealing fresh insights into the work of John Keats, the book also sheds further light on the importance of cognitive approaches to poetic and grammatical analyses and how both language and the body can serve as forms of communication through which metaphors can be expressed and contextualized.

This volume will appeal to students and scholars interested in cognitive linguistics, figurative language, emotion studies, cognitive science, and Anglophone poetry.