Coleridge, language and the sublime
Subtitle: from transcendence to finitude
By: by Christopher Stokes
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 210
ISBN-13: 9780230278110
Description: Coleridge, Language and the Sublime is the first full-length study to engage Coleridge's work through the aesthetics of the sublime. It argues for a double-edged Coleridge whose poetic and metaphysical commitments to transcendence were played out, under the sign of sublimity, against his sharp awareness of weakness and lack. Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, his position in a conversation about finitude - a conversation that encompasses Longinus, Burke and Kant as well as modern theorists of the sublime - is shown to be an important element of our own post-Romantic legacy. Drawing on close readings of the best known poetry (the Conversation lyrics, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) as well as more obscure poems, his prose works and notebooks, this study offers a vibrant, alternative Coleridge who is neither the magisterial architect of Romantic idealism, nor disillusioned and dejected, but a profound thinker of what it means to be at the limits of thought, language and experience.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Language, Longinus, emotion: "violently agitated by a real passion": Longinus and Coleridge's effusions; "the self-watching subtilizing mind": the impassioned self in the 1798 Fears in solitude quarto; title: Terror, Burke, ethics: "cruel wrongs and strange distress": an ethical terror-sublime in "The destiny of nations"; "my soul in agony": the terrors of subjectivity in "The rime of the ancient mariner"; title: Representation, Kant, theology: "ye signs and wonders of the element! utter forth God": divine presence and divine withdrawal in the natural sublime; "what never is but only is to be": the ontology of the Coleridgean sublime; title: Conclusion: "a specimen of the sublime dashed to pieces": sublimity in The biographia literaria and the limbo constellation.