Jane Austen

The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge are crucial to the literature of European Romanticism. As well as the early poems such as The Ancient Mariner and 'Frost at Midnight' for which he is probably best known they comprise lectures, periodical essays, letters, notebooks and marginalia, and the records of his conversation. Now that those texts arc more widely available we can see a different Coleridge whose writings make a vital intervention in aesthetic and political theory as well as literature. The breadth and variety of those writings can be bewildering, and this book provides a lively and accessible guide to the whole of Coleridge's writing career. It traces from Coleridge's early poems to his late theory of a Christian state a continued preoccupation with an audience, with education, and with the idea of a Church, revealing a surprising Coleridge with much to say to the present.
About the Author

Stephen Bygrave is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. His books include: Coleridge and the Self (1986) Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology (1993) and, as editor, an introductory textbook Romantic Writings (1996).