Now available from Ashgate Publishing…
Tragic Coleridge
Chris Murray, Durham University, UK
‘…a significant contribution to the study of Coleridge and to the concept of Romantic Tragedy more widely.’
– Sally West, University of Chester, UK and author of Coleridge and Shelley: Textual Engagement
To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tragedy was not solely a literary mode,
Contents: Introduction: Romantic tragedy and tragic Romanticism;
but a philosophy to interpret the history that unfolded around him.
Coleridge’s tragic influences; Hamartia and suffering in the poetical
Tragic Coleridge explores the tragic vision of existence that Coleridge
works; The catastrophes of real life; The tragic ‘impulse’: fragments
derived from Classical drama, Shakespeare, Milton and contemporary
and Coleridge’s forms of incompletion; The Lear vocation: Coleridge
German thought. Coleridge viewed the hardships of the Romantic
and Romantic theatre; The tragic sage; Failed sacrifices and the
period, like the catastrophes of Greek tragedy, as stages in a process
un-tragic Coleridge: Conclusion: ‘The sage, the poet, lives for all
of humanity’s overall purification. Offering new readings of canonical
mankind’, Bibliography, Index.
poems, as well as neglected plays and critical works, Chris Murray
elaborates Coleridge’s tragic vision in relation to a range of thinkers,
from Plato and Aristotle to George Steiner and Raymond Williams.
He draws comparisons with the works of Blake, the Shelleys, and
Keats to explore the factors that shaped Coleridge’s conception of
tragedy, including the origins of sacrifice, developments in Classical
scholarship, theories of inspiration and the author’s quest for civic
status. With cycles of catastrophe and catharsis everywhere in his
works, Coleridge depicted the world as a site of tragic purgation, and
wrote himself into it as an embattled sage qualified to mediate the
vicissitudes of his age.
View this title online at: www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409447542
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June 2013
194 pages
Hardback
978-1-4094-4754-2
£55.00