A Modern Coleridge Cultivation, Addiction, Habits [Paperback]

A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Introduction PART I: CULTIVATION 1. Cultivating Reason and the Will 2. The Shaping Spirit of Education 3. Staging Education: 'The Appeal to Law'. Wordsworth's 'Peter Bell'. And 'The Ancient Mariner' 4. Sympathy: Adam Smith and Coleridgean Education PART II: ADDICTION 5. Re-reading Culture and Addiction: Coleridge's Writings on Civilisation and Walter Benjamin's Analysis of Modernity and the Addict 6. Craving for Novelties - Craving for Novels: The Politics of Intoxicated Reading 7. He 'did not write, he acted poems': Kubla Khan, Luther and Rousseau PART III: HABITS 8. 'habits of active industry' (AI, 49) 9. The Habit of 'abstruse research': 'Dejection: and Ode' Conclusion: Cultivation through Love: 'Effusion XXXV' and 'The Eolian Harp' Bibliography Index

ANDREA TIM?RS STUDY BRINGS A FRESH PERSPECTIVE to the problem of Coleridges mature politics by viewing his concerns about the dangers of the fast diffusion of information and knowledge (64) and restless craving for the wonders of the day (63) alongside the similar concerns of Walter Benjamin, whoin the years leading up to the Second World Waridentified the deleterious effects of modernity. (Paul Cheshire, The Coleridge Bulletin, Issue 51, Summer, 2018)

Deployment of the three motifs of cultivation, addiction, and habit gives a welcome thematic coherence to the whole, particularly as the argument gathers up the interrelations of the three. This framework to the book also gives a sense of anticipation for readers, enhanced by the presentation of interesting combinations of texts. & the ambitious reach of the book andlS@