The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge

by John Worthen

Overview

Author of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', ‘Kubla Khan' and ‘Christabel', and co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the great writers and thinkers of the Romantic revolution. This innovative introduction discusses his interest in language and his extraordinary private notebooks, as well as his poems, his literary criticism and his biography. John Worthen presents a range of readings of Coleridge's work, along with biographical context and historical background. Discussion of Coleridge's notebooks alongside his poems illuminates this rich material and finds it a way into his creativity. Readers are invited to see Coleridge as an immensely self-aware, witty and charismatic writer who, although damaged by an opium habit, responded to and in his turn influenced the literary, political, religious and scientific thinking of his time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521746434
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/02/2010
Series:	Cambridge Introductions to Literature
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.39(d)

About the Author

John Worthen is Professor Emeritus of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. Early life and contexts: 1772–1802; 2. Poetry; 3. Notebooks; 4. Mid-life works and contexts: 1803–1814; 5. Language; 6. Criticism; 7. Later works and contexts: 1815–1834; Afterword; Further reading.

Editorial Reviews

"...concise and written with verve...provides a lively introduction to the sheer breadth of Coleridge's prose—to the wit and energy, and the gnomic particularities which will fascinate the reader."
-Nicholas Reid, NBOL 19

From the Publisher