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.

John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination reassesses Thelwall's eclectic body of work from the perspective of his heterodox materialist arguments about the imagination, political reform, and the principle of life itself, and his contributions to Romantic-era science.

Drawing on newly-discovered manuscripts, this collection is the first modern edition of poetry by John Thelwall, the famed radical Romantic and champion of the working class. Eight key essays and 125 fully-annotated poems introduce his work in correspondence with historical traditions and current critical paradigms.

John Thelwall was London Corresponding Society's most prominent orators and was tried for high treason along with Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke in 1794. This edition brings together Thelwall's most important political writing ranging from scientific pamphlets and writings on the art of elocution, to political philosophy and journalism.

John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Robespierre's Reign of Terror spawned an evil little twin in William Pitt the Younger's Reign of Alarm, 1792-1798. Terror begat Alarm. Many lives and careers were ruined in Britain as a result of the alarmist regime Pitt set up to suppress domestic dissent while waging his disastrous wars against republican France. Liberal young writers and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for the American and French revolutions raised hopes for Parliamentary reform at home saw their prospects blasted. Over a hundred trials for treason or sedition (more than ever before or since in British history) were staged against 'the usual suspects' - that is, political activists. But other, informal, vigilante means were used against the 'unusual suspects' of this book: jobs lost, contracts abrogated, engagements broken off, fellowships terminated, inheritances denied, and so on and on. As in the McCarthy era in 1950s America, blacklisting and rumor-mongering did as much damage as legal repression. Dozens of 'almost famous' writers saw their promising careers nipped in the bud: people like Helen Maria Williams, James Montgomery, William Frend, Gilbert Wakefield, John Thelwall, Joseph Priestley, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, Francis Wrangham and many others. Unusual Suspects tells the stories of some representative figures from this largely 'lost' generation, restoring their voices to nationalistic historical accounts that have drowned them in triumphal celebrations of the rise of English Romanticism and England's ultimate victory over Napoleon. Their stories are compared with similar experiences of the first Romantic generation: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Burns, and Blake. Wordsworth famously said of this decade, 'bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!' These young people did not find it so-and neither, when we look more closely, did Wordsworth.

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

John Thelwall was London Corresponding Society's most prominent orators and was tried for high treason along with Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke in 1794. This edition brings together Thelwall's most important political writing ranging from scientific pamphlets and writings on the art of elocution, to political philosophy and journalism.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literary lecture arrived on London's cultural scene as an influential critical medium and popular social event. It flourished for two decades in the hands of the period's most prominent lecturers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors' reading habits, burnish their own professional profiles, and establish a literary canon. Auditors wielded their own considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a lecturer's success, and independent series could collapse midway if attendance waned. Two chapters are therefore devoted to the auditors, whose creative responses to what they heard often constituted cultural works in their own right. Auditors wrote poems and letters about lecture performances, acted as patrons to lecturers, and hosted dinners and conversation parties that followed these events. Prominent auditors included John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Crabb Robinson, Catherine Maria Fanshawe, and Lady Charlotte Bury. The Romantic public literary lecture is a fascinating cultural phenomenon in its own right, but understanding the medium has significant implications for some of the period's most important literary criticism, such as Coleridge's readings of Shakespeare and Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets (1818). The book's two main aims are to chart the emergence of the literary lecture as a popular medium and to develop a critical approach to these events by drawing on an interdisciplinary discussion about how to treat historical speaking performances.

Making extensive use of the rich archival material contained within the Coetzee collections in Texas and South Africa, from the earliest drafts and notebooks to the research notes and digital records that document his later career as both writer and academic, this volume investigates the historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts of Coetzee's oeuvre. Cutting-edge and interdisciplinary in approach, the book looks both at the prolific archival traces of Coetzee's early and middle work as well as examines his more recent work (which has yet to be archived), and a wide range of materials beyond the manuscripts, including family albums, school notebooks and correspondence. Navigating Coetzee's interests in areas as diverse as literature, photography, autobiography, philosophy, animals and embodied life, this is also an exploration of the archive as both theory and practice. It raises questions about the tensions, contradictions and discoveries of archival research, and suggests that a literary engagement with the past is crucial to a recovery of culture in the present.