A Coleridge Companion

An Introduction to the Major Poems and the Biographia Literaria

John Spencer Hill

The entire text of this book is available below.

Publication Data Hardcover   (Britain) London:   Macmillan Press, 1983 ISBN:   0-333-23769-2 278 pages + index Jacket-design from Das Eismeer (1823) by Caspar David Friedrich (Kunsthalle, Berlin).

Jacket Blurb SO much has been written about Coleridge's major poems and the Biographia Literaria, especially during the past three or four decades, that it is difficult for anyone who is not a devoted specialist to have a clear understanding of the critical trends and issues.   A Coleridge Companion provides a thorough yet highly readable distillation of Coleridge scholarship on such works as The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and the Biographia Literaria; and it offers the general reader a concise and straightforward appreciation of the major critical problems and the major lines of analysis associated with the best known and most frequently studied of Coleridge's works.   Each chapter contains a detailed account of the composition and publication history of an individual work, addresses a variety of important critical issues (e.g., the influence of opium on Kubla Khan), and summarizes the most important interpretative approaches to the work in the critical tradition from Coleridge's time to the present day.

A Coleridge Companion is not a descriptive or annotated bibliography.   It is an introduction, a reader's handbook, and -- in intention at least -- a work of genial criticism in which the reader is guided through the primary texts and secondary materials in an orderly, illuminating fashion.

Preface and Abbreviations

List of Plates

1. Coleridge:   A Biographical Sketch
   
2. The Conversation Poems
   • Introduction
   • The Eolian Harp
   • Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement
   • This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison
   • Frost at Midnight
   • Fears in Solitude
   • The Nightingale
   
   
3. Kubla Khan
   • Introduction
   • Composition, Publication History and the Crewe Manuscript
   • Opium and the "Dream" of Kubla Khan
   • The 1816 Preface and Kubla Khan as a "Fragment"
   • Sources and Influences
   • Interpretative Approaches to Kubla Khan
   
   
4. The Ancient Mariner
   • Composition and Publication History
   • Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Supernatural
   • The Ancient Mariner as a Ballad
   • Sources and Influences
   • Critical Approaches to The Ancient Mariner
   • A Note on the "Moral" of The Ancient Mariner
   
   
5. Dejection:   An Ode
   • Composition, Redactions and Publication History
   • "A Letter to--" (4 April 1802)
   • The Wordsworth-Coleridge "Dialogue"
   • Dejection:   An Ode (1817)
   
   
6. Biographia Literaria
   • Evolution and Compositional History
   • The Structure of Biographia Literaria

Index

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