[DOWNLOAD] "Citizen Juan Thelwall: In the Footsteps of a Free-Range Radical (Critical Essay)" by Studies in Romanticism * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

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eBook details

• Title: Citizen Juan Thelwall: In the Footsteps of a Free-Range Radical (Critical Essay)
• Author : Studies in Romanticism
• Release Date : January 22, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 261 KB

Description

IN A. S. BYATT'S NOVEL POSSESSION: A ROMANCE, A PAIR OF SCHOLARS USE their academic detective skills--a talent for research, scholarly dedication, a kind of educated serendipity--to unlock the secret romance behind the ashen, mothballed lives of two nineteenth-century poets. Though unlikely to become a bestseller, my story contains many of the same elements--a hidden romantic waterfall, a scandalous love affair, the discovery of a lost manuscript, a poignant gravesite, even a French connection--and comes to a similar end in the revelation of a surprising new face for an earnest and eccentric nineteenth-century writer. That writer is John Thelwall, and those who know me know that in recent years I too have become possessed, gripped by a peripatetic passion that matches Thelwall's own. In the summer of 2004, that passion found its object in two archival discoveries, one topographical, the other textual, that promise to revolutionize the way that scholars understand a life and work long hailed as worthy of revival but so far curiously undocumented. My discovery not only of the exact site and significant landmarks of Thelwall's watershed exile in Wales, but of a 1000page manuscript of his complete poems, never known to have existed, fills in the blanks of a life as dramatic and a body of work as coherent and ambitious as those of any of the famous romantics. A paradoxical man of both stalwart integrity and metamorphic mobility, Thelwall repeatedly revived and reinvented himself in response to persistent efforts to silence his powerfully provocative voice. "Citizen John," the firebrand radical orator and "maker of the English working class" (1) was also a skillful and original writer and performer who more than any of his contemporaries embodied Wordsworth's definition of the poet as a "man speaking to men." Breaking the mould of Romantic Recluse, he wove threads from history into his own mythic mantle as the Hope of Albion, Champion, Healer and Teacher of the People's voice. But freedom of speech was not Thelwall's only passion; late in life, this man "proscribed for loving humankind" (2) championed a different kind of transgression, as Citizen John transformed himself into a Don Juan Pygmalion who gives voice and makes love to his own "embrion" (3) Daughter of Adoption. It is a "true romance" whose traces glimmer like a palimpsest between the lines of the two discoveries that I made in 2004, whose critical significance I will here elucidate by following in the footsteps of a free-range radical. Act 1: The Road to Llyswen Farm

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