This monograph employs John Keats’s concept of negative capability as a framework to revisit 18th-century fiction from a contemporary perspective. Negative capability, as articulated by Keats (1817), refers to the capacity to accept “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Both in literature and life, negative capability can be understood as the capacity to remain at ease with uncertainty and confront and live with the ambiguities that shape our e ...