num_pages: 205
description: Contest for Cultural Authority takes a fresh look at one of the scandals of literary William Hazlitt's harshly satirical reviews of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Regency press. Traditionally deplored as "malignant" personal attacks on a former friend, Hazlitt's eight reviews of Coleridge's writings between 1816 and 1818 engage such landmark works as Christabel, The Statesman's Manual, and the Biographia Literaria, harnessing the rising power of Regency review-criticism to devastating effect. By taking seriously Hazlitt's own classification of these articles as "political essays," and by relocating them within the turbulent public debates of the late Regency, Robert Keith Lapp discovers in them an indispensable critique of Coleridge's conservative response to the post-Waterloo crisis known as the "Distresses of the Country."Using cultural history to revise literary history, Lapp discovers in Hazlitt's reviews of Coleridge a debate between two prominent authors that brings into sharp focus larger forces of political, commercial, and literary struggle at a moment of crisis in British history. Once Hazlitt's voice is recovered inthis debate with Coleridge, the struggle between two of British Romanticism's foremost critics comes to epitomize a contest for cultural authority between a post-Enlightenment Romanticism of libertarianprotest, rooted in the democratic force of "common sense" and "public opinion," and a visionary Romanticism that asserts the free subjectivity of "Poetic Genius." Lapp resituates Hazlitt's reviews of Coleridge within such contexts as the bristling arena of politicaldebate, the volatile marketplace for literatureand literary criticism, and the shifting hierarchy of genres and modes by which discursive authority was performed within the public sphere. New light is thus shed on such colorful Regency episodes as the Christabel controversy and the Wat Tyler affair as well as on such period issues as the struggle to address emergent and divergent reading audiences, the role of satire in review-criticism, and the rise of public lecturing.
language: English
title: Contest for Cultural Authority: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the Distress of the Regency
titlecomplete: Contest for Cultural Authority: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the Distress of the Regency
publisher: Wayne State University