Coleridge's Sublime Later Prose and Recent Theory

This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the author's previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum , this study focuses on sublime theory and discourse in Coleridge's other major prose texts of the 1820s: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829). This book thus ponders the constellations of aesthetics, literature, religion, and politics in the sublime theory and practice of this central Romantic author and three of his important successors: Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière.

Advances scholarship on Coleridge's later major prose, which has received little critical attention Places Coleridge's sublime in dialogue with sublime theory and discourse of the last fifty years Situates Coleridge's perennial appeal in relation to the concerns and discourses of our more recent era

Auteur

Murray J. Evans is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Winnipeg and Retired Fellow at St John's College, University of Manitoba, Canada. He has taught medieval literature and medievalism, Coleridge, children's literature, "Inklings" C.S. Lewis et al., literary history, and literary theory. He is the author of Rereading Middle English Romance (1995) and Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum (Palgrave, 2012) and has also published essays on Malory and the Malory manuscript, Chaucer, Piers Plowman, Coleridge, and C.S. Lewis.

Texte du rabat

This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge s later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the author s previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum, this study focuses on sublime theory and discourse in Coleridge s other major prose texts of the 1820s: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829). This book thus ponders the constellations of aesthetics, literature, religion, and politics in the sublime theory and practice of this central Romantic author and three of his important successors: Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière.

Résumé

"Coleridgeans ... with little interest in modern theory, should read this book, as it provides fresh insights into the later Coleridge not ordinarily available from single-author analyses. Evans' comparative breadth can only deepen our appreciation of the persistence of the Coleridgean milieu." (Peter Larkin, The Coleridge Bulletin, Vol. 63, 2024)

Contenu

1. Introduction.- 2. Touchstones for Sublimity: Coleridge's Lay Sermons (181617) and the 1818 Lectures on Literature.- 3. Sublime Boundaries of Belief and Unbelief: Coleridge's Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824) and Julia Kristeva's This Incredible Need to Believe (2006).- 4. Sublime Disintegration: Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825) and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) .-5. Sublime Politics: Coleridge's On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and Jacques Rancière's Aisthesis (2011).- 6. Conclusion: The Sublime in Coleridge, Kristeva, Adorno, and Rancière