Bringing together an exciting variety of approaches, the fifteen authors here direct attention to Coleridge's relation to the sciences of life --a term which embraces a much broader field than modern science. Accordingly there are essays on Coleridge and the vitalist debate, political and social ideas, race theories, dissent, literary relations, and language, as well as on his relation to contemporary optics, chemistry, geology, anatomy, and medicine. Taken all together,Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Lifemarks a vital and exciting development in Coleridge criticism.
Preface Illustrations Abbreviations 1. Introduction,Nicholas Roe 2. Myths of Community in theLyrical Ballads1798-1998: The Commonwealth and the Constitution,Elinor Shaffer 3. The Political Sciences of Life: From American Pantisocracy to British Romanticism,Kenneth R. Johnston 4. Jews, Jubilee, and Harringtonianism in Coleridge and Maria Edgeworth: Republican Conversions,Susan Manly 5. Coleridge and 'the Oran utan hypothesis': Romantic Theories of Race,Peter J. Kitson 6. Theorizing Golgotha: Coleridge, Race Theory, and the Skull Beneath the Skin,Tim Fulford 7.Kubla Khanand the Theory of the Earth,James C. McKusick 8. Coleridge's Abstruse Researches,Neil Vickers 9. Space for Speculation: Coleridge, Barbauld, and the Poetics of Priestley,Jane Stabler 10.The Rime of the Ancient MarinerandFrankenstein,Beth Lau 11. Coleridge's 'Hymn before Sun-rise' and the Voice Not Heard,Angela Esterhammer 12. Coleridge and the End of Autonomy,Seamus Perry 13. Historicist Readings ofThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner,Raimondo Modiano 14. Coleridge's Secret Ministry: Historical Reading and Editorial Theory,Kelvin Everest 15. How Shall We Write the Life of Coleridge?,John Beerló/