Romanticism, Imagination, and Feminist Reframing in Keats and Campion (Video Notes)

Vocabulary flashcards derived from the video notes comparing Keats’ Romantic poetry with Jane Campion’s Bright Star, focusing on themes of transience, muse, imagination, gendered agency, and stylistic contrasts.

Romanticism

A literary/artistic movement valuing imagination, emotion, nature, and individual experience; Keats embodies the Romantic belief in beauty as an enduring truth accessed through imagination.

Transience

The fragility of human desire and the inevitability of change, a key focus linking Keats and Campion in their exploration of the human condition.

Imagination (Romantic)

The Romantic power to perceive enduring beauty and truth beyond the observable world, used by Keats to access lasting ideals.

Muse

A source of artistic inspiration; traditionally passive in much Romantic poetry, but reimagined by Campion as an active, agentic figure.

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Keats’ ballad in which a knight is enthralled by a mysterious enchantress, illustrating the destructive consequences of surrendering to illusion.

Eve of St Agnes

Keats’ poem where Madeline’s dreamlike surrender of conscious agency is signified by the extinguishing of the taper in a dreamscape.

Spenserian Stanza

A nine-line stanza with the rhyme scheme ABABBCBCC used by Keats to evoke medieval romance and dreamlike repetition.

Bright Star

Keats’ sonnet celebrating unwavering love; used to show the tension between permanence and impermanence, later reframed by Campion.

Male gaze

A cinematic framing and perspective that presents the world from a male viewer’s point of view; Campion challenges this by foregrounding a female perspective.

Female gaze

A cinematic perspective centered on female subjectivity and experience, used by Campion to reclaim agency for the muse.

Feminist postmodernism

An approach combining feminism with postmodern theory to critique fixed narratives and emphasize marginalized voices; informs Campion’s reimagining of Romanticism.

Agency

The capacity to act and make autonomous decisions; foregrounded for the muse and for Fanny in Campion’s interpretation.

Patriarchal Romanticism

The idea that Romantic-era culture often reinforced male dominance and objectified women as muses, signaling a patriarchal framework in Keats’ context.

Impermanence

The quality of being temporary or changing; Campion reframes grief as a form of enduring resilience in the face of impermanence.

Resonance and dissonance

How Keats and Campion dialogue: resonance preserves core ideas while dissonance invites reinterpretation across time.

Visual close-up

A film technique that isolates a detail or face to heighten emotional intensity, used in Bright Star to visualise Fanny’s grief.

Muted colour palette

A restrained, subdued range of colors used to convey mood, memory, and sorrow in Bright Star.

Three days as a butterfly

A line illustrating a modern valuation of brief, authentic connection over an eternity of loveless sameness.