The Family Romance Of The Impostor Poet Thomas Chatterton

The enigma of Thomas Chatterton is investigated by Louise J. Kaplan, who untangles the counterfeiter from the artist, the troubled adolescent from the visionary poet, as she recreates the short life of a fatherless boy who found an authentic voice only in the realm of his imaginings.

00 The enigma of Thomas Chatterton is investigated by Louise J. Kaplan, who untangles the counterfeiter from the artist, the troubled adolescent from the visionary poet, as she recreates the short life of a fatherless boy who found an authentic voice only in the realm of his imaginings. The enigma of Thomas Chatterton is investigated by Louise J. Kaplan, who untangles the counterfeiter from the artist, the troubled adolescent from the visionary poet, as she recreates the short life of a fatherless boy who found an authentic voice only in the realm of his imaginings.

Thomas Chatterton was a poet, forger, and adolescent suicide, and the debate over his work was a pivotal episode in the history of eighteenth-century literature. It ultimately established Chatterton as the inspiration for Romantic poets like Blake, Coleridge, and Keats. This book is a major collection of diverse new essays by scholars, critics, and writers like Peter Ackroyd and Richard Holmes. They show the mercurial Chatterton in exciting new contexts, and restore him as a seminal figure in English Literature.

Home and Away: The Place of the Child Writer is an important contribution to the fast-growing and rapidly evolving field of literary juvenilia studies. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars is the first in this area to be published in the past decade. To reflect recent developments, Home and Away both theorises the current state of this richly interdisciplinary academic field and exemplifies juvenilia studies in action. An authoritative review of the origins and future of literary juvenilia studies is followed by a collection of essays on individual authors. Wide-ranging in literary periods covered, geographical regions represented, and methodological approaches employed, the collection is organized around the basic tenet that the familiar world of home and the as–yet–untravelled territory of adulthood are both important to the imaginations of juvenile authors. The relationships and values of the parental home, the topography of the home place, the literature and lives that first fired their imaginations as children, find expression in young writers’ works. So too do the unfamiliar or extra-familiar connections, lifestyles, landscapes, and literature that the child writer anticipates, imagines, or invents, whether as a means of temporary escape while still at home, or as a process of preparing for adulthood and artistic maturity.

From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this pioneering book explores a series of problems regarding the containment of representation. Stewart focuses on specific cases of "crimes of writing"--the forgeries of George Psalmanazar, the production of "fakelore," the "ballad scandals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imposture of Thomas Chatterton, and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. In this way, she emphasizes the issues which arise once language is seen as a matter of property and authorship is viewed as a matter of originality. Finally, Stewart demonstrates that crimes of writing are delineated by the law because they specifically undermine the status of the law itself: the crimes illuminate the irreducible fact that law is written and therefore subject to temporality and interpretation.

The selections from 132 authors in this anthology represent gender, social class, and racial and national origin as inclusively as possible, providing both greater context for canonical works and a sense of the era’s richness and diversity. In terms of genre, poetry, non-fiction prose, philosophy, educational writing, and prose fiction are included. Geographically, America, Canada, Australia, India, and Africa are represented along with Britain, emphasizing Romantic literature as a world literature. Biographical headnotes, explanatory footnotes, and an extensive bibliography clarify and illuminate the texts for readers.

In Oscar Wilde's Chatterton, Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell explore Wilde's fascination with the eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, who tragically took his life at the age of seventeen. This innovative study combines a scholarly monograph with a textual edition of the extensive notes that Wilde took on the brilliant forger who inspired not only Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats but also Victorian artists and authors. Bristow and Mitchell argue that Wilde's substantial “Chatterton” notebook, which previous scholars have deemed a work of plagiarism, is central to his development as a gifted writer of criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry. This volume, which covers the whole span of Wilde's career, reveals that his research on Chatterton informs his deepest engagements with Romanticism, plagiarism, and forgery, especially in later works such as “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,”The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Grounded in painstaking archival research that draws on previously undiscovered sources,Oscar Wilde's Chatterton explains why, in Wilde's personal canon of great writers (which included such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), Chatterton stood as an equal in this most distinguished company.

This study addresses the question of artistic identity and the myth of the artist as it has been shaped by the artists themselves. While the term artist is to be understood in a broad sense, the focus of this study is the literature of the Romantic tradition. Identity is largely perceived as a construct, and a central hypothesis of this book concerns its aesthetic value and the ways it creates dominant narratives of self-perception that produce powerful myths. The construction of the artist’s identity, be it collective or personal, rests on a series of aesthetic praxes. Caught between the mythic idealisation of poetic genius and its social devaluation, the Romantic artist seeks to create a place for himself, and in doing so, he engages in his own mythmaking. This process is studied in an interdisciplinary perspective, approaching texts and writers from different traditions. The study analyses various typologies of the artist, numerous mythmaking strategies as well as several postural techniques; all of which have sketched major direct or indirect fictional self-portraits in the European tradition.