Publisher's Synopsis
The importance of Coleridge's theory of imagination for post-Romantic literary thought is as all-pervading as it is hard to determine and localize. This is a study of the genesis of Coleridge's ideas in the historical and ideological context in which they intervened.;From the scientific and political importance of imagination in the period of Coleridge's collaboration with Wordsworth, through the labyrinths of post-Kantian aesthetics, to the scholary concern with the classical "Misterycults" and their concealed connection with Coleridge's later cultural politics, this book offers a new and challenging interpretation of the relations between criticism and society in the Romantic period.
