Full Description
This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the author's previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum, this study focuses on sublime theory and discourse in Coleridge's other major prose texts of the 1820s: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829). This book thus ponders the constellations of aesthetics, literature, religion, and politics in the sublime theory and practice of this central Romantic author and three of his important successors: Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière.
Contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Touchstones for Sublimity: Coleridge's Lay Sermons (1816-17) and the 1818 Lectures on Literature.- 3. Sublime Boundaries of Belief and Unbelief: Coleridge's Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824) and Julia Kristeva's This Incredible Need to Believe (2006).- 4. Sublime Disintegration: Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825) and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) .-5. Sublime Politics: Coleridge's On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and Jacques Rancière's Aisthesis (2011).- 6. Conclusion: The Sublime in Coleridge, Kristeva, Adorno, and Rancière
