Erotic Coleridge charts Coleridge's prolific creation of love poems from early flirtatious verse to poems about marital incompatibility, the blank faces of young women fearing for their reputations, the obliterating seductions of young women, the exaltation of falling in love, the spoken and sung voices of women, the pain of jealousy, and late meditations on how to live with the waning of love. In his prose he responds to Parliamentary debates about punishing adulteresses and gives advice about how marriage can warp the soul. In his sensual exuberance and his ethics of reverencing the individuality of other persons, Coleridge attends closely to the lives of women.
Coleridge has been perceived as the youthful author of a few brilliant poems. This study argues that his poetry is actually a continuous process of experimentation and provides a new perspective on both familiar and unfamiliar poems, as well as the relation between Coleridge's poetry and philosophical thinking.
This book examines how Coleridge staged his private woes in the public space of the newspaper. It looks at his publications in the Morning Post, which first published one of his most famous poems, Dejection. An Ode. It reveals how he found a socially sanctioned public outlet for poetic disappointments and personal frustrations which he could not possibly articulate in any other way. Featuring fresh, contextual readings of established major poems; original readings of epigrams, sentimental ballads, and translations; analyses of political and human-interest stories, this book reveals the remarkable extent to which Coleridge used the public medium of the newspaper to divulge his complex and ambivalent private emotions about his marriage, his relationship with the Wordsworths and the Hutchinsons, and the effect of these dynamics on his own poetry and poetics.
Examining a range of Coleridge's writings, this book uses recent scientific research to understand how we have evolved to make mental representations of the counterfactual, how such transformative essays in Imagination have enabled humans to survive, to prosper and to express themselves in the sciences, the arts and particularly in poetry.
This book analyzes Coleridge's male friendships during the 1790s. It shows the poet's experience of relationship is structured by and contributes to contemporary debate about friendship. Examination of Coleridge's epistolary relations with Poole, Southey, Lamb, Lloyd, Thelwall, Wordsworth, and Godwin demonstrates that each friendship negotiates issues of relationship discussed throughout English culture of this period.
The long-established association of Romanticism with youth has resulted in the early poems of the Lake Poets being considered the most significant. Tim Fulford challenges the tendency to overlook the later poetry of no longer youthful poets, which has had the result of neglecting the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey of the 1820s and leaving unexamined the three poets' rise to popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. He offers a fresh perspective on the Lake Poets as professional writers shaping long careers through new work, as well as the republication of their early successes. The theme of lateness, incorporating revision, recollection, age and loss, is examined within contexts including gender, visual art, and the commercial book market. Fulford investigates the Lake Poets' later poems for their impact now, while also exploring their historical effects in their own time and counting the costs of their omission from Romanticism.
In Sex, Lies, and Autobiography James O'Rourke explores the relationships between literary form and ethics, revealing how autobiographical texts are able to confront readers with the moral complexities of everyday life. Tracing the ethical legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions in a series of English-language texts, the author shows how Rousseau's doubts about the possibility of ethical behavior in everyday life shadows the first-person narratives of five canonic works: William Wordsworth's Prelude, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Villette, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Offering a fascinating new way of thinking about ethics through literature, Sex, Lies, and Autobiography challenges the most fundamental principles of the philosophical study of ethics, revealing the innate difference between morality in life and morality in literature. O'Rourke begins with Rousseau's inability to reconcile his intuitive belief that he is a good person with the effects that his actions have on others, and he goes on to show how this same ethical impasse recurs in the five aforementioned texts. The ethical crises these texts describe, such as when Jane Eyre's happiness can be purchased only at the cost of Bertha Mason's suicide, or when Humbert Humbert's artistry demands the sacrifice of Dolores Haze, are not instances of authorial ethical blindness, O'Rourke says, but rather are ethical challenges that force us as readers to consider our own lives. In each of these works, a narrator attempts to justify his or her behavior and fails; in each case, the rigorous narrative of self-examination demands a similar effort from the reader, whose own sense of moral rectitude is put into question. Confronting the long-held philosophical construction that links ethical principles and life choices, thereby reassuring us of the ethical coherence of everyday life, the narrators of these literary autobiographies come to a very different conclusion; by looking back on their lives, they cannot understand how their most benevolent desires led to such damaging life stories. By leaving meaning inexplicit, O'Rourke argues, these texts are able to recover traumatic material that is ordinarily repressed and then bring that repressed knowledge to bear on self-justifying narratives. For readers interested in autobiographical studies, ethical criticism, and trauma and literary studies, Sex, Lies, and Autobiography provides a groundbreaking analysis of the role of ethics in literature.
A practical and comprehensive reference work, the Oxford Handbook provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on all aspects of Coleridge's diverse writings. Thirty-seven chapters, bringing together the wisdome of experts from across the world, present an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a major author of British Romanticism. The book is divided into sections on Biography, Prose Works, Poetic Works, Sources and Influences, and Reception. The Coleridge scholar today has ready access to a range of materials previously available only in library archives on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bollingen edition, of the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forty years in production was completed in 2002. The Coleridge Notebooks (1957-2002) were also produced during this same period, five volumes of text with an additional five companion volumes of notes. The Clarendon Press of Oxford published the letters in six volumes (1956-1971). To take full advantage of the convenient access and new insight provided by these volumes, the Oxford Handbook examines the entire range and complexity of Coleridge's career. It analyzes the many aspects of Coleridge's literary, critical, philosophical, and theological pursuits, and it furnishes both students and advanced scholars with the proper tools for assimilating and illuminating Coleridge's rich and varied accomplishments, as well as offering an authoritative guide to the most up-to-date thinking about his achievements.
