Synopses & Reviews
Drawing on newly discovered archives, this book offers the first full-length study of John Thelwall's poetry and his partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. By exploring Thelwall's arts and acts in theory and practice, and in conversation with his contemporaries, Judith Thompson restores a powerful but long-suppressed voice to our understanding of British Romanticism and blazes new trails in a well-trodden field.
Review
'Painstaking but also passionate, Thompson's textual-biographical study reveals that the famous creative duet of Wordsworth and Coleridge was really a trio. John Thelwall has been resurrected.' - H. J. Jackson, professor of English, University of Toronto
'John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle is a tour de force of biographical, rhetorical, and theoretical criticism. It restores John Thelwall as a 'missing link' in our cultural formations of English Romantic literature. Thompson clearly shows how Thelwall is 'there,' even though he has been, until very recently, almost invisible—both as a poet in his own right, and as an enabler and catalyst to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Our image of 'the origins of British Romanticism' must be radically—indeed!—revised by her work on this great Romantic radical.' - Kenneth R. Johnston, Ruth N. Halls Professor, Indiana University
'By inserting Thelwall into the foundational friendship of English Romanticism, Thompson's highly original and intellectually ambitious study reconfigures what we mean by English Romanticism. We come away from Thompson's book with not just a new Thelwall, one with more intellectual depth and breadth, but a new Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose work reflects an ambivalent encounter with Thelwall.' - - Michael Scrivener, Distinguished Professor of English, Wayne State University
Synopsis
In this book, Judith Thompson restores a powerful but long-suppressed voice to our understanding of British Romanticism. Drawing on newly discovered archives, this book offers the first full-length study of the poetry of John Thelwallas well as his partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
About the Author
Judith Thompson is a professor of English literature at Dalhousie University. She is the editor of John Thelwall's The Peripatetic, the co-editor of Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship, and is the author of numerous articles on Thelwall, including a digital chronology and multimedia volume on his play The Fairy of the Lake.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Mapping the Circle * PART I: Coleridge & Co. * Corresponding Society * "Sweet Converse" * The Politics of Collaboration * Covert Contradictions* PART II: Annus Mirabilis * Prospecting: Towards a New Peripatetic * "The Echoing Wye" * Action and Reaction * PART III: Re: Wordsworth and Thelwall * The Retrospective Glance * Poetry and Reform: Reviving the Sonnet * Poetry and Reform: Resounding the Ode * "And yet again recovered": Reclaiming the Recluse