Contest for Cultural Authority
Subtitle: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the Distresses of the Regency
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: March 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 205
ISBN-13: 9780814328330
Subjects: Literary studies: 19th century; c 1800 to c 1900; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834; Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; United Kingdom, Great Britain; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Hazlitt, William; Literature; 1772-1834; 19th century; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,; Criticism; Criticism and interpretation; England; Great Britain; History; Literature and history; Literature and society
Description: "Contest for Cultural Authority takes a fresh look at one of the scandals of literary history: 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.""--BOOK JACKET.