Romantic Circles Blog

Romantic Circles is pleased to announce two new scholarly resources, John Thelwall in Time and Text and John Thelwall in Performance, both edited by Judith Thompson.

These resources complete a three-part project entitled John Thelwall: Recovery and Reassessments, whose first part, John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments, edited by Yasmin Solomonescu, is a collection of essays in the Romantic Circles Praxis series.

Both resources fill significant gaps in knowledge of the long, diverse, prolific but notoriously under-documented career of a Romantic polymath who is now the focus of renewed scholarly attention. In the absence of a full biography, John Thelwall in Time and Text fulfills an urgent need to gather, collate, and circulate existing biographical and bibliographical information, in an accessible location and format, to serve the growing community of Thelwall Studies. This chronology and bibliography charts what is thus far known about Thelwall’s residences and travels, his chief activities, his writings and lectures, and his correspondence, along with related events, and locations where primary texts can be found.

John Thelwall in Performance: The Fairy of the Lake documents the first full production of a Thelwall play. It contains an introductory essay by Judith Thompson (“Origins, Contexts, Transformations: Reviving the Fairy of the Lake”) and a full performance video of the 2009 Dalhousie/Zuppa Theatre production of Thelwall’s 1801 “dramatic romance,” as well as a series of series of short video documentaries by student filmmaker Brooke Fifield, exploring the creative challenges, practical considerations and unexpected delights involved in bringing a long-neglected piece of radical Romantic theatre from dusty page to modern stage.