Thomas Chatterton And Romantic Culture

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.

Thomas Chatterton wrote poetry, forged medieval manuscripts, and died in tragic and mysterious circumstances - either adolescent suicide or accidental drug overdose. He left reams of original poetry, and a vast and complex archive of medieval works supposedly discovered in a Bristol church. The debate about the authenticity of these 'Rowley' papers was a pivotal episode in the history of eighteenth-century letters that ultimately established Chatterton as the herald of Romanticism and an inspiration for later poets. And yet there has been almost no critical work on this extraordinary and influential writer. This book restores Chatterton as a seminal figure in English literature. It is a major collection of diverse new essays by writers, biographers, critics, and scholars, showing the mercurial Chatterton in new contexts, perpetually challenging the genres of writing: ultimately mixing history, fiction, and myth in a great post-Enlightenment reinvention of the past. As Peter Ackroyd says in his foreword, Thomas Chatterton is 'the one great genius of historical restoration and renewal in this country'.

Even 235 years after his supposed death by suicide, Bristol s boy-poet Thomas Chatterton remains a fascinating and controversial figure. This challenging collection of eight essays questions long-held assumptions about Chatterton's life and offers new insights into the young poet's influence on English art and literature. Architectural historian Timothy Mowl argues that, rather than a proto-Romantic, Chatterton was more a Rococo poet living among the eclectic furore of a brash Rococo city. Art historian Michael Liversidge assesses how the Chatterton myth encouraged and influenced artistic depictions of St Mary Redcliffe church by artists such as Girtin,Turner and Varley.

Long before Wordsworth etherealized him as 'the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride', Thomas Chatterton was touted as the 'second Shakespeare' by eighteenth-century Shakespeareans, ranked among the leading British poets by prominent literary critics, and likened to the fashionable modern prose stylists Macpherson, Sterne, and Smollett. His pseudo-medieval Rowley poems, in particular, engendered a renewed fascination with ancient English literature. With Chatterton as its case study, this book offers new insights into the formation and development of literary scholarship in the period, from the periodical press to the public lecture, from the review to the anthology, from textual to biographical criticism. Cook demonstrates that, while major scholars found Chatterton to be a pertinent subject for multiple literary debates in the eighteenth century, by the end of the Romantic period he had become, and still remains, an unsettling model of hubristic genius.

The categories of authenticity and sincerity, treated sceptically since the early twentieth century, remain indispensable for the study of Romantic literature and culture. This book, focusing on authors including Wordsworth, Macpherson and Austen, highlights their complexities, showing how they can become meaningful to current critical debates.

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.

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.

Lynda Pratt's collection of specially commissioned essays is the first edited volume devoted to the multiple connections between Robert Southey (1774-1843) and English Romantic culture. A major and highly controversial personage in his own day, Southey has until recently been the forgotten member of the Lake School.