Coleridge To Catch 22

This collection of Coleridge's political and social writings includes the second "Lay Sermon" of 1817 and "In the Constitution of Church and State", printed with only slight abridgements. It also has groups of briefer extracts tracing major steps in the development of Coleridge's mature thought.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power - acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this volume Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge's actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office - shedding new light on Coleridge's sense of political and legal morality.

In the twentieth century, literature was under threat. Not only was there the challenge of new forms of oral and visual culture. Even literary education and literary criticism could sometimes actually distance novels, poems and plays from their potential audience. This is the trend which Roger D. Sell now seeks to reverse. Arguing that literature can still be a significant and democratic channel of human interactivity, he sees the most helpful role of teachers and critics as one of mediation. Through their own example they can encourage readers to empathize with otherness, to recognize the historical achievement of significant acts of writing, and to respond to literary authors’ own faith in communication itself. By way of illustration, he offers major re-assessments of five canonical figures (Vaughan, Fielding, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and Frost), and of two fascinating twentieth-century writers who were somewhat misunderstood (the novelist William Gerhardie and the poet Andrew Young).

DH Lawrence and Tradition indicates how Lawrence interprets, revalues, absorbs, and transforms the work of Blake, Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot, Hardy, Whitman, and Nietzche. Though the critics differ in their approaches to the question of Lawrence's relation to tradition and receptivity to influence, they all assume that his use of the style, forms, and ideas of his predecessors is positive. The contributers believe that Lawrence's fiction, poetry, and criticism derive their resonance, meaning, and value--and much of their inspiration--from his vital connection to significant authors of the nineteenth century. Since tradition can be construed as the cultural equivalence of the individual consciousness, this book explores the very roots of Lawrence's art. The essays examine how Lawrence fulfills the implications and completes, the potential of his Romantic and Victorian forebears and how, by rewriting the works of others, he makes them entirely his own. Though Lawrence transcends any single literary influence, part of his receptive genius is the ability to select and learn from the traditions of the past. He had the persistance, and courage to continue the struggle with the potent dead and, from his spiritual combat, to re-create a new are. Lawrence's exploration of earlier writers and his cultivation of underlying temperamental an stylistic affinities lead him to self-discovery. His debts to traditions enhance rather than diminish his originality and establish him more seriously as a writer of the first rank.