During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which saw Greek revival, many of the Romantic poets chose the classical myths as the subject of their poetry. John Keats wrote mythological poems: 'I stood tip-toe upon a little hill', Endymion, 'Hyperion: A Fragment' and several sonnets. Leigh Hunt, Keats's influential mentor, also wrote mythological narrative poems: 'Hero and Leander', 'Bacchus and Ariadne' and 'The Nymphs'. However, the poems of Keats, who was Hunt's protege, as well as Hunt's, were harshly censured by conservative reviewers. For these poems were full of excessive sexuality, immorality, a subversive attitude, and lack of classical education. It is true that Hunt inspired Keats's adoption of Greek myths as the main subject of his poetry. This was pointed out by not only conservative reviewers of Keats's time, but also modern critics. Above all, Jeffery N. Cox states that Keats, whose innate inclination for "the Greek spirit, -the Religion of the Beautiful, the Religion of Joy" continues to express his belief in eternal love and perpetual erotic excitement, like Hunt, even in the time of writing 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Certainly, as Keats proclaims in 'To Leigh Hunt, Esq.', he will offer poems that satisfy the demand for ancient Greek nostalgia, Keats's attraction to Greek mythology in the Humean and Gibbonesque mode is guided by Hunt celebrating Greek mythology's cheerfulness. Keats, however, in Endymion appears to take a different stance from that of Hunt, for their mythological characters show a great gap between the two poets. Little is known about Hunt's 'Bacchus and Ariadne', but this poem especially serves to disclose Hunt's attitude towards classical myth as well as his ideas on it. In order to confirm Keats's distance from Hunt, I consider the following three points. First, I analyze Gaius Valerius Catullus's 'On the Nuptials of Peleus, and Thetis', from which Hunt learns several motifs and imagery of Ariadne and Theseus. Then I explore Hunt's voluptuous love, which was severely censured by conservative reviewers. Finally, I compare the treatments of women's sorrow in 'Bacchus and Ariadne' by Hunt and in Endymion and 'Ode to a Nightingale' by Keats.

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The object of this essay is to consider the characteristics of fictionality and its meaning in a romance, Mary Shelley's Valperga: or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca(1823). After the revolutionary years following 1789-1815, and thereafter the oppressive dominion under the reactionary Hapsburg Emperors of Austria, people in Europe during this turbulent period recognized that their sense of history had basically changed. William Godwin in his essay, "Of History and Romance" (1797), which explored the relationship between history and romance, introduced his idea of the technique of the engraftment, with which the fictional romance is adequately blended with history. Valperga is a novel based on the life of Castruccio, an actual Ghibelline tyrannical ruler in fourteenth-century Tuscany. The locale of the novel is Valperga, an imaginary fortress-like castle, the last heiress of which is liberal Euthanasia, the Guelph, the Ghibelline's enemy. The relic of the medieval chivalry, exhibited there, shows us that Valperga inherits the romance tradition as a literary genre. Shelley, using the exploits of Castruccio recorded in 'public histories' almost diachronically, is trying to describe the respectively different ways of life of two women protagonists, for Castruccio, Euthanasia and Beatrice. There Shelley, relying on 'the private chronicles' in her own times, pictures their self-conscious feelings with imaginative metaphors. The medieval Holy Roman Empire imposed its authority on Italian city-states, just as a political Austrian sovereignty threatened Italian civic republicanism after 1818. Clearly Shelley in her romance, as Stuart Curran suggests, not only views real lives in the medieval past but through them, from the standpoint of a woman, contemplates the unrewarding actualities of people, living in obscurity on the periphery of the society in her own times and also in the future. Just as in Godwin's essay, Deidre Lynch compares such a design of Shelley's in the anachronistic fiction to the technique of the 'graft onto' the historical record. In the last scene depicting Euthanasia's death, Shelley impressively combines both historical fact and fictional realism. Here we find the 'virtuality' that Tilottama Rajan mentions as the site for the imagination.

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