Keats, Peterloo and Seriality

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a counter-intuitive attempt to read the events of August 1819 in relation to the phenomenon of seriality. Departing from the Revolutionary tradition of the journée, and therefore perhaps not really a bounded ‘event’ at all, Peterloo was instead, in James Chandler’s account in England in 1819, an ongoing breach in systems of representation. I argue that analyses of popular serial forms in media studies, which emphasize the open-endedness of seriality, can help to account for some of the peculiarities of the treatment of time and happening in post-Peterloo poems by John Keats and (more marginally) by P. B. Shelley. Situating these poems in relation to early forms of serial perception in the period, and to Marx and Baudelaire’s later Romantic approaches to seriality in the wake of the 1848 Revolution, I argue that seriality can help us to understand the ways in which lyric poems meet revolutionary thought in their shared questioning of the hyperbolic breach in historical time that we associate with each of them.