Coleridge's Sublime Later Prose and Recent Theory / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"Murray Evans's new book provides probing readings of the role of the sublime in Coleridge's later work, including Aids to Reflection and On the Constitution of the Church and State. Evans shows how sublime instability, boundary-crossing, and excess can be found even in works that appear to defend religious and literary orthodoxies. Still further, he illuminates, and expands the relevance of, these readings by adventurous forays into major theoretical writing from the past few decades. This is a bold and stimulating contribution to scholarship on Romanticism." -Mark Canuel, Professor of English and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago

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.

Murray J. Evans is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Winnipeg and Retired Fellow at St John's College, University of Manitoba, Canada. He has taught medieval literature and medievalism, Coleridge, children's literature, "Inklings" C.S. Lewis et al., literary history, and literary theory. He is the author of Rereading Middle English Romance (1995) and Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum (Palgrave, 2012) and has also published essays on Malory and the Malory manuscript, Chaucer, Piers Plowman, Coleridge, and C.S. Lewis.