Coleridge, Language and the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude [Hardcover]

Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his?poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of 'the limit' with contemporary force.Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction PART I: LANGUAGE, LONGINUS, EMOTION 'Violently Agitated by a Real Passion': Longinus and Coleridge's Effusions? 'The Self-Watching Subtilizing Mind': The Impassioned Self in the 1798 Fears in Solitude Quarto PART II: TERROR, BURKE, ETHICS 'Cruel Wrongs and Strange Distress': An Ethical Terror-Sublime in 'The Destiny of Nations' Chapter 4: 'My Soul in Agony': The Terrors of Subjectivity in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' PART III: REPRESENTATION, KANT THEOLOGY 'Ye signs and wonders of the element! Utter forth God': Divine Presence and Divine Withdrawal in the Natural Sublime 'What never is but only is to be': The Ontology of the Coleridgean Sublime PART IV: CONCLUSION 'A Specimen of the Sublime dashed to pieces': Sublimity in the Biographia Literaria and the Limbo constellation Endnotes Bibliography

'Christopher Stokes finds in Coleridge's dealings with the sublime a way into the patterns of his thinking, as they are articulated both in his poetry and in his philosophy. It is an impressive, ranging, perceptive account: the book takes on a subject that we thought we knew all about and discovers something new to say about it.'

- Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford University, UK