Imaginary friendship: John Keats and parasocial relationships

In this presentation of my in-progress PhD research, I explore the issues of influence, imagination and social feelings in the poetry of John Keats through the lens of parasocial interaction, a term borrowed from media theory and sociology, and which has entered mainstream discourse over the past few years. Additionally, Keats’s work can help us to understand parasocial relationships in a more nuanced way than a lot of current discourse allows. I argue that parasocial feelings are a natural extension of our empathy for others, neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and that Keats’s later poetry shows how and why we should handle them with care.