| dc.contributor.author | Lapp, Robert Keith. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:36:39Z | |
| dc.date.available | 1997 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1997 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ24778 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55519 | |
| dc.description | Between June 1816 and August 1817, William Hazlitt wrote seven anonymous and harshly oppositional reviews of Coleridge's writings during this period. These reviews have been traditionally rejected as personally motivated and even "malignant" in intent, but this thesis finds them instead to be fundamentally public and political in motivation and emphasis, and in fact to offer an indispensable critique of Coleridge's response to the socio-political crisis known as the "Distresses of the Country" (1816-1817). Indeed, by recovering Hazlitt's side of a pivotal literary-political debate, these writings are found to epitomize a larger contest for cultural authority between two formations within bourgeois ideology: between Hazlitt's post-enlightenment romanticism of libertarian protest, rooted in the democratic force of "common sense" and "public opinion," and Coleridge's withdrawal into visionary idealism, rooted in the autonomous subjectivity of "Poetic Genius." | en_US |
| dc.description | Hazlitt's reviews of Coleridge are taken up in chronological order, from his Examiner review of the Christabel volume, through his four separate reviews of The Statesman's Manual in the Examiner and the Edinburgh Review, to his Examiner review of Coleridge's Courier essays on Wat Tyler, and finally his review-essay of the Biographia Literaria in the Edinburgh Review. A separate chapter is devoted to a reappraisal of Coleridge's little-read Statesman's Manual. In each case, the text in question is situated as a product of three overlapping discursive contexts: the arena of political debate, the volatile marketplace for literature and literary criticism, and the shifting hierarchy of genres and modes by which discursive authority was performed within the public sphere. In this way, the public struggle between British Romanticism's two foremost critics comes to epitomize a distinct moment in British cultural history. Once resituated within the contexts of political, commercial, and generic struggle, Hazlitt's reviews of Coleridge bring to light some of the most important discursive and ideological conflicts unfolding within middle-class culture at a critical moment in what Raymond Williams has called "the long revolution." | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1997. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, English. | en_US |
| dc.title | Contest for cultural authority: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the "Distresses of the Country," 1816-1817. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
