Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This literary life of the best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own Biographia Literaria as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge and his life in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it, and is a 'must-read' for any student or scholar of Coleridge.

William Christie is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has taught and published extensively on Romanticism, and will be contributing to the forthcoming book, Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (edited by Nick Roe) and the Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era: 1760-1850 (edited by Chris Murray). He has also published a wide range of articles on Coleridge and Wordsworth for journals such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Sydney Studies in English, Prose Studies and the British Journal of Aesthetics.

Acknowledgements * List of Abbreviations * Chronology * Prologue: Literary Life 1815 * 'The Discipline of His Taste at School': Christ's Hospital and Cambridge * 'The Progress of His Opinions in Religion and Politics': The Radical Years * 'A Known and Familiar Landscape': Conversations * 'The Poet, Described in Ideal Perfection': Annus Mirabilis * 'The Toil of Thinking': Private Notes and Public Newspapers * 'To Rust Away': Lost Years, 1800-1806 * 'The One Proteus of the Fire and the Flood': Critic for Hire * 'To Preserve the Soul Steady': The Sage of Highgate * Epilogue * Notes * Further Reading * Index