Reading Keats's Poetry is an unusual and thrilling book: thrilling for the depth of its theoretical explorations, and unusual for its sustained focus on a single poet. Günday's Keats is a poet bent on experimenting with consciousness and subjectivity, warping the shape of subject-object relations in increasingly daring ways, almost as a deliberate experiment in unmaking subjectivity in verse. By literary studies standards, the book is uncommonly thorough in its explorations of Lacanian thought. It works through a huge range of Lacan's seminars, his écrits, and also commentaries by prominent Lacanians, to reveal in Keats's work impossible forms of consciousness modeled on non-Euclidean geometry. Günday supplements this analysis with occasional recourse to the posthuman thinking of Rosi Braidotti, who, in conjunction with Lacan, is said to trace a "reconfiguration of the human subject," one (negatively) capable of "awaken[ing] the human to his/her non-human dimension" (40). Such a thing is apparent, for instance, in Keats's apostrophes to the nightingale or in Lamia's serpentine metamorphoses. Because the discussions of Lacan are unusually deep (and notably accurate), Reading Keats's Poetry will be daunting for some Romanticists and captivating to others. I found it captivating. The book does sometimes frustrate in its organization and proportionality. The brilliance of its particular insights are also subsumed at times into a reassuring tale of creative experimentation as a form of freedom, with the poet breaking free from the orthodoxy of binary thinking and an oppressive metaphysics of presence. In general, however, this is a very insightful and innovative book that brings a welcome daring to Keats studies. It will be an important book for those interested in poststructuralism and Romanticism, or those interested more broadly in how poetry can work through and against language to reconfigure consciousness. These are both valuable contributions to the field, and impressive, especially for an author's first book.

Lacanian work on Romanticism, or from within literary studies in general, can sometimes be a bit "light"--i.e., the Lacan is often used approachably and glancingly, drawing on relatively few concepts and texts from the psychoanalyst's career, and mainly to make a point about literature. This is not the case with Reading Keats's Poetry. Günday draws on all phases of Lacan's work, more than a dozen texts and two dozen Lacanian concepts. Of particular importance here are Lacan's concepts of the sinthome (from his seminar on James Joyce), meaning the unique tie that precariously holds the imaginary, symbolic, and real in place together; of foreclosure (from his early work on psychosis), where the subject's paranoid entanglement with the imaginary disrupts their usual symbolic relation to language; of "extimacy" (from his middle-period seminar on ethics), where the subject is said to hold the unconscious not within their psyche, but externally; and of the "lamella" (a passing but beloved moment from Lacan's Seminar XI), the substance of undead libido as a creeping, amoeba-like pellicle. All four of these Lacanian concepts, which are just a sampling of Günday's range, are relatively unusual to encounter within literary studies, where mirror stages, symbolic orders, khora, and objets petit a most often prevail. These are complicated theoretical apparatuses, and, impressively, I didn't notice anywhere where Günday is saying anything misleading or oversimplified about them. This is a psychoanalytic vocabulary fully understood, carefully explained, and capably demonstrated with specific reference to Keats. This is meritorious in and of itself, before we even consider whether it makes for worthwhile readings of the poetry--although indeed it does that too.

The book has four chapters, plus an introduction and brief conclusion. Chapter 3, in particular, is brilliant, and makes the entire book worthwhile. It considers psychotic structures at work in Isabella, Lamia, and "La Belle Dame Sans Mercy" (using the Indicator spelling). Here, Günday strikes the perfect balance between daring literary interpretation, depth of theoretical discussion, and meaningful, counterintuitive new readings of the poems. Günday very convincingly reads Isabella's relation to Lorenzo's severed head as evidence of a psychotic break, finding in the repeated words "And she forgot... / She had no knowledge" (lines 417-424) evidence of the collapse of external reality, the emergence of non-linear temporalities, and the construction of a new relation to the signifier (125-134). Just as Isabella transforms Lorenzo into a posthuman basil-man, Lycius's "psychotic disintegration" in Lamia turns his reptilian beloved into an "unchained signifier" resistant to meaning (148). Finally, the "Belle Dame," with her "honey wild," incarnates "the foreclosed signifier in the real," leaching into the imaginary to flummox the knight-at-arms, and leading to a total "collapse of the metaphysics of presence" (157). It's a highly compelling reading of psychosis in poetry--something that, because psychosis implies a nonstandard relation to meaning and language, is not easy to achieve.

The fourth chapter, on topology in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," is likewise compelling. Günday draws on the notion of extimacy to suggest that the poem positions the reader on "both" sides of a Möbius strip of sorts, simultaneously in the atemporal aesthetic world of the urn and the place of enunciation. The poem, in this reading, becomes a marker of the speaker's desire to meld with the urn's world of images and representations, as a way of managing desire. Thus, in a culmination of the book's overall argument, the speaker "no longer looks at the world from a dualistic perspective but cherishes the multiple possibilities and potentials arising out of subject-object, human-nonhuman, or animate-inanimate intersections" (189). This is the reason the line between beauty and truth ultimately collapses.

The first two chapters are, I would say, a bit less successful, though still worthwhile. Chapter One--the book's longest, at about 50 pages--simply recaps Lacan and, to a lesser extent, Braidotti. This overview is skillful and without error but hardly mentions Keats at all. As a result, the literary analysis only emerges about halfway through the book. It would be better, I think, to explicate Lacan as needed through the encounter with Keats, making this a conversation rather than an application. The second chapter presents a welcome pivot to Keats and "Ode on a Nightingale," along with "Drear Nighted December," yet the analysis of the poems can feel bowed under the weight of the theoretical explanations, as if Keats exists to illustrate Lacan or Braidotti. But once this argumentative ground has been cleared, the final 80 pages of the book, as described above, are quite insightful and clarifying.

Some additional intellectual contexts might have enriched Günday's already rich analysis. The book discusses Lacan extensively but never Freud, despite Lacan's avowed Freudianism; and discusses Braidotti without acknowledging that concepts such as deterritorialization, assemblage, and becoming-animal were coined by Deleuze and Guattari. The book generously engages both modern Lacanian theory (Bruce Fink, Ellie Ragland, Jacques-Alain Miller, Tom Eyers) and current Keats scholarship (Orrin Wang, Richard Marggraf Turley, Li Ou, Karen Swann, D. J. Lee), but is noticeably detached from a body of psychoanalytic work on Romantic poetry (Laura Claridge, David Simpson, Joel Faflak, David Collings, Alex Freer, Daniela Garofalo). Colin Carman, who like Garofalo has analyzed Keats in a specifically Lacanian way, is referenced only once in passing. These are missed opportunities but not serious lapses of scholarly judgment--rather, they indicate possible directions for the conversation to go from here.

The book is highly focused on posthuman forms of existence--how the speaker identifies with the object-voice of the nightingale; how meaning collapses through proliferating, seductive images; how the speaker yearns to slide into a realm of aestheticized stillness. Günday's combination of Lacan and Braidotti opens powerful insights into transformation, object relations, and consciousness. Still, treating Braidotti as an extension of Lacan may have its limitations, and I often wish the book did more to put them into dialogue. Braidotti arises out of a Deleuzo-guattarian tradition that is certainly connected to Lacanian psychoanalysis but often hostile to it. There may also be a basic impasse between the Spinozism of Braidotti and the Hegelianism of Lacan, which ought to be discussed and thought through. Engagement with work such as Lacan and the Posthuman (ed. Svitlana Matviyenko and Judith Roof, 2018) might have deepened this line of inquiry. But these are small concerns in comparison to the immense satisfaction of reading this book and testing out its deterritorializations of thought. We encounter a Keats unafraid to challenge the substance of modern consciousness in verse. Günday offers vivid new readings of familiar poems, especially Isabella and Lamia, and asks us to understand poststructuralist thought as having a history tracing at least to the nineteenth century. Reading Keats's Poetry is a commendable experiment in reading Romantic poetry with theory and marks the addition of a significant scholarly voice to the field.

David Sigler is Professor of English at University of Calgary, Canada.