TEXT PRINT CULTURE丨Coleridge and Historical Presence

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座信息 / Information 

Time: 12 October, 2021, 15:00-17:00

Format: Zoom meeting

Zoom ID: 817 227 16292

Zoom PW: 194812

 讲座摘要 / Abstract 

In his “Table Talk” of 11 September 1831, Samuel Taylor Coleridge staked a claim to a unique place in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history. “My system,” he suggested, “opposes no other,” but lifts up each “to a higher point of view,” in order “to make History scientific, and Science historical—to take from History its accidentality – and from Science its fatalism.” The vast claim courts incredulity, and raises the question of Coleridge’s possible status as a “scientific historian.” Is Coleridge potentially a prototype for R.G. Collingwood’s definition of this mode of scientific study—of solving problems, not surveying periods, putting questions to “the world of ideas” discoverable within historical evidence in the present? Is Coleridge, alternatively, the pattern of the deluded “pigeon-holer,” arranging the past “in a single scheme” and bragging about “raising history to the rank of a science.” Re-reading Coleridge with Collingwood and twenty-first century accounts of historical idealism and of “presence,” and in the light of live debates about the “fall” of history and historical fact, this lecture traces a distinct and quickening historical interest back through On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), The Friend (1818) and Biographia Literaria (1817), to the essays comparing France and “Rome under the first Caesars” in the Morning Post of 1802.

 主讲人简介 / CV 

Tom Duggett is Senior Associate Professor in Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong – Liverpool University (XJTLU) and Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Gothic Romanticism (2010), a study of Wordsworth and the “ancient constitution,” which won the Modern Language Association of America’s Prize for Independent Scholars for Distinguished Research in Language and Literature. Tom is Advisory Editor of the A&HCI journal Romanticism (Edinburgh University Press), and Volume Editor in both the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe (CUP) and in the Pickering Masters series of the Prose Works of Robert Southey (Routledge, Taylor & Francis). He has published widely in A&HCI journals, including Review of English Studies, Romanticism and The Wordsworth Circle, and has recently contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (OUP, 2020) and The Cambridge History of the Gothic (CUP, 2020).

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