Remediating a Literary Genre: Jane Campion’s "Bright Star" and John Keats’s Biographies in the 2010s

In a letter written in the 1870s, George Eliot defined biographers as “a disease of English literature”. Scholars should be less biased than Eliot, but biography as a literary genre is undeniably rooted in British culture. English literature is in fact “filled with a long and proud tradition of life writing” (Bostridge 2004: xi), as the massive Oxford Dictionary of National Biography proves. After the well-known works of Walter Jackson Bate (1963), Robert Gittings (1968) and Andrew Motion (1997), four new biographies of John Keats were published in the early 2010s. Along with White's "John Keats: A Literary Life" (2010), Gigante’s insights into the life of Keats as the brother of the less-known George (2011) and Nicholas Roe’s "John Keats: A New Life" (2012), Jane Campion hit the box office in 2009 with the motion picture "Bright Star": a romantic, romanticized and poetical biography of the last three years of poet's life. By looking into these works in relation to existing knowledge on Keats’s life, this essay ascertains to which extent the constraints imposed by different media (and different audiences) may change the way biographical facts are presented, provide new knowledge, and contribute to the creation of a popular myth. On the one hand Campion’s film is worth investigating as an instance of remediation for making biographical facts fit the screen and the public of moviegoers; on the other hand, biography as a genre raises similar questions as it is a “bastard” product of the “unholy alliance” of fiction and fact” (Holmes 1995: 15), oscillating between the research fields of literature and history.