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Lamia takes its origin from Greek mythology, Lamia is the daughter of Poseidon, the God of the sea, and Lybie, the queen of the Libya. Then Lamia’s beauty charms Zeus over and becomes his mistress, which outrages Hera so much that she catches Lamia’s kids away and kills them all. She then cast a spell on Lamia and turns her into a half man and half snake monster. Thus, Lamia revenge Hera by killing every kid she can reach because of her love for her lost children. So, Lamia has long been taken as a negative image for its child-eating behavior and known for hunting children in the Western.

After complex transformation in the medieval literature, for example, she is often depicted as a character fueled with hatred and grief and even a symbol as a female criminal and seducer in Christian doctrine. And Nicolas K. Kiessling compares Lamia with two monsters Succubus and Grendel in Beowulf, which makes her an erotic figure as Succubus refers to a woman demon that was believed to have sexual intercourse with men while they were asleep while Grendel is a man-eating monster. Before John Keats, many stories have scandalized Lamia and thus make her a fictional and evil character.

1.2 Lamia and Negative Capability

Keats first mentions the concept of “negative capability” on December 21, 1817, in a letter to his Tom and George:

Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. (Selected Letters 60)

To Keats, Negative capability is a necessary capability for a talented poet. It is a capability to embrace the uncertainty of the world, open himself up to accept and feel both positive and negative sides of the world, as an imagination vessel. This conception of a poet’s identity is crucial to Keats in his conceiving a utopia as an ideal world, as most utopias as well as utopian characters in his poems are subjective imaginative constructs that paradoxically challenge human’s subjectivity, reason in particular. This is not only shown in his portrayal of the abstract tension between feeling and imagination as opposed to fact and reason, but also shown in his portrayal of a variety of utopian characters. In “Lamia”, needless to say, the heroine is a typical figure that Keats creates on the basis of negative capability. And Lamia is a figure of rich senses and of animal-like nature. The characterization of Lamia and the core elements of negative capability is consistent.

Chapter Two The Palace as a Utopian Place

2.1 The Palace as a Perfect Sanctuary

In “Lamia,” utopianism is not only reflected in Keats’s portrayal of the heroine, but even more importantly, expressed in his presentation of a crucial image: a palace-like construction she built to shelter themselves. Lamia brings Lycius to the palace that is in “a place unknown”, which Keats describes in ornamental det本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。