It's from a pay-per-view Daily Telegraph, but I'll post the link and a short extract of it below so you can get the gist. What badly written academic or other book have you encountered lately?
=============================== Is Keats 'un-woke'? Why scholars are tying themselves up in knots
By Roger Lewis: 6 February 2021
Situated for two centuries in the icy silence of his tomb, in the Cimitero Acattolico, Rome, John Keats at least hasn’t had to confront the Keatsians – the scholars, academics and other buffoons, who have published books and papers about Keats’ Post-Newtonian Poetics, The Etymology of Porphyro’s Name, The Dying Keats: A Case for Euthanasia? and, not forgetting, Keats, Modesty and Masturbation.
Now comes Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), which is one big farrago of cliché, jargon, mixed metaphor and general sloppiness. Page upon page is filled with phrases like under the skin, scruff of its neck, strapped for cash, cocked a snook, one fell swoop, punches far above the weight. Ad infinitum, via, raison d’être, status quo, inter alia and social kudos pepper the paragraphs, along with opined, emotional fallout, hands-on mentor, helicopter parenting, suburban new-build, dysfunctional childhood, downside and “a bonding eight-week hiking holiday”.
Miller talks about wanting “to foreground those aspects” of this, that and the other thing; she’ll “excavate their backstories”. Keats, “a lower-class literary wannabe”, stuck to his “individual take, regardless of the mainstream” – which is another way of saying the poet “refused to bow to conventionalities in his lifetime”, though it’s hard to see how he could do anything much – bow, scrape, dance a jig – after his lifetime.
If the contemporary critics generally mocked Keats’s work, this is because “periodical culture was a seething piranha pool in which poetry and politics were joined at the hip”. His Romantic imagination, we are vouchsafed, was “elastic, winged and capacious”, which conjures in my mind a picture of Ena Sharples’s knickers.
Miller imposes on Keats her righteous and reproving “woke” sensibility. She is unhappy about “exploitative political power” in any guise, and in Regency England, “most Britons… would have found it hard to make sure their investments were ethically pure”.
Keats’s mother’s second husband was a bank clerk who “remained tied at a remove to the international slave economy”. When Keats’s brother George settled in Kentucky, he befriended the ornithologist Audubon, “who has recently been outed as a slave holder”.
Poor Miller traps herself in a whirligig of assertions, for example, that English literature itself is “in denial of the fact” it was developing and flaming into being “on the back of a burgeoning capitalist empire.” So what are we meant to do, then? Cancel literacy, tradition and civilised habits out of a trumped up sense of phoney guilt?
I also wonder why Miller has taken Keats as her subject, as she is worried that he is already “canonised as a dead white European male”, which implies that only live black or Asian women are truly morally upright, possess fortitude and humility, and are hence permitted a voice.
Having established her dedication to “today’s postcolonial consciousness”, which is irrelevant, as Keats himself would have probably only possessed a pre-colonial consciousness, or perhaps a colonial consciousness (he visited the Isle of Wight – is that part of the Empire? Also Dorking – is that?); having assured us she is unimpeachable, Miller is then keen to rat on Keats for The Eve of St Agnes.
Where, along with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, I’d long happily believed the poem an erotically charged dream-vision, Miller says it is about “a Peeping Tom and sexual predator… the scenario feels uncomfortable today”, as if composed by Roman Polanski with help from Woody Allen. The verses describe “non-consensual sex and a male poet’s fantasy”.....