This is Dr Wheeler's analysis of the Biographia Literaria, one of the central prose texts of the Romantic period.

"Many nineteenth-century writers believed that the best tragedy should be read rather than performed, and they have often been attacked for their views by later critics. Through detailed analysis of Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, Lamb's On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, and Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Heller shows that in their concern with educating the reader these Romantics anticipate twentieth-century reader response criticism, educational theory, and film criticism."--Publishers website.

From its first issue, published on the 10th October 1802, Francis Jeffrey's "Edinburgh Review" established a strong reputation and exerted a powerful influence. This is a literary study of the "Edinburgh Review" for over fifty years. It contextualizes the periodical within the culture wars of the Romantic era.

This new edition of the Biographia supersedes all previous editions. Crucially, it takes into consideration 3 decades of research and scholarship on Coleridge and includes all Coleridge's references and allusions. In tracing all unattributed references, Adam Roberts has in some cases opened up whole new avenues of interpretation for the text, materially altering or changing the way we read this classic work. This new scholarly edition for a 21st-century readership includes a detailed Critical Introduction, a Textual Introduction, the text of the Biographia Literaria, including Coleridge's notes and editorial footnotes; Endnotes; and a Bibliography. It is likely to stand as the definitive textual edition for many years to come. Key Features:. The first edition of the Biographia in 3 decades and the first ever to identify all of Coleridge's many allusions and quotations Draws on the most up-to-date scholarship on the text Fully explains the genesis, the poetic and philosophical contexts and debates surrounding the text Provides the chance to revitalise Romanticism studies more generally

First published in 1983, this book examines a work whose intricacies have baffled and infuriated generations of readers and proposes a theory of Coleridge’s writing habits that "explain(s) his explanation". The author painstakingly analyses the Biographia’s organising structure distinguishing between the daring conception and often inept execution of Coleridge’s idea of critical discourse. It is argued that Coleridge’s autobiographical format present a richly metaphorical "self" whose literary life has led to the now-famous doctrine of secondary imagination. The author’s command of Coleridge scholarship will shed new light on the Biographia for specialists and non-specialists alike.

To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tragedy was not solely a literary mode, but a philosophy to interpret the history that unfolded around him. Tragic Coleridge explores the tragic vision of existence that Coleridge derived from Classical drama, Shakespeare, Milton and contemporary German thought. Coleridge viewed the hardships of the Romantic period, like the catastrophes of Greek tragedy, as stages in a process of humanity’s overall purification. Offering new readings of canonical poems, as well as neglected plays and critical works, Chris Murray elaborates Coleridge’s tragic vision in relation to a range of thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to George Steiner and Raymond Williams. He draws comparisons with the works of Blake, the Shelleys, and Keats to explore the factors that shaped Coleridge’s conception of tragedy, including the origins of sacrifice, developments in Classical scholarship, theories of inspiration and the author’s quest for civic status. With cycles of catastrophe and catharsis everywhere in his works, Coleridge depicted the world as a site of tragic purgation, and wrote himself into it as an embattled sage qualified to mediate the vicissitudes of his age.

Wordsworth’s process of revision, his organization of poetic volumes and his supplementary writings are often seen as distinct from his poetic composition. Bates asserts that an analysis of these supplementary writings and paratexts are necessary to a full understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry.

No detailed description available for "The Supplement of Reading".

This is a study of the collaborative creation behind literary works that are usually considered to be written by a single author. Although most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a concept of single authorship, many works are actually developed by more than one author. Stillinger examines case histories from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mill, and T.S. Eliot, as well as from American fiction, plays, and films, demonstrating that multiple authorship is a widespread phenomenon. He shows that the reality of how an author produces a work is often more complex than is expressed in the romantic notion of the author as solitary genius. The cumulative evidence revealed in this engaging study indicates that collaboration deserves to be included in any account of authorial achievement.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's prose has long confounded its critics. In Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language, Jerome Christensen offers a reading of the prose which captures its pious, perverse vitality and characterizes its rhetorical form. Coleridge sought "to expose the folly and legerdemain of those who have... abused the blessed machine of language." Christensen develops a framework for reading Coleridge's language by first exploring Coleridge's critique of David Hartley's philosophy of associationism. Although Coleridge discredited Hartley's system, he failed to devise a coherent alternative. Lacking a firm grounding for his philosophical method, Coleridge wrought a mobile, fragmentary discourse which, Christensen asserts, is important to the Romantic tradition not because it is central, but because it is brilliantly eccentric. Christensen navigates the complexities of Coleridge's language in prefaces, guides, marginalia, notebooks, letters, essays, and manuals, but chiefly in the Biographia Literaria and The Friend, his major works in prose. The Biographia, he argues, is best conceived of as marginal discourse—a category that subsumes not only Coleridge's criticism of association but also the mix of deference and dominance in his engagement with Wordsworth's genius. In The Friend, Coleridge appears as the figure of the Friend, mediator between the extremes of principle and prudence. These extremes do meet in Coleridge's prose, but the moral force of the encounter is vitiated by Coleridge's purely rhetorical resolution in the figure of chiasmus. The chiasmus, Christensen concludes, is the trope that both shapes The Friend and propels the blessed machine of Coleridge's language.