''The Regions of Poetic Thought': A critical edition of the Selected Literary Criticism of Sara Coleridge'

1830年至1850年间，女性读者和作家构成了文坛的一大部分，而女性文学批评家是选择和塑造文学受众的重要声音。《诗意思维的领域：莎拉·柯勒律治文学批评选集》使我们能够听到这样的声音。她是一位具有罕见智慧和理论影响的批评家，也是一位对自己所处时代充满活力的评论员。她的重要贡献范围很广。首先，在一系列开创性的新版本中，她是她父亲塞缪尔·泰勒·柯勒律治的争议性和学术性的重现者。这一开创性的工作得到了后来编辑和评论家的高度赞扬，但很难读到：这本书代表了她对《反思的辅助》(1843)、《传记文学》(1847)和《自己时代的杂文》(1850)最重要的贡献。其次，在近30年的时间里，她是华兹华斯的杰出批评者--既有钦佩的，也有怀疑的。与她的父亲一样，华兹华斯是她创作生涯中伟大的形成者，也是对她自己的诗歌产生最大影响(甚至领先于STC)的人。第三，她的书信是她自己越来越受人赞赏的诗歌和散文小说的最佳指南。在这些书中，她为自己孩子的诗句和《幻影》辩护，反对那些认为它们缺乏道德设计的读者：她认为，作者的主要目的和目的在于通过展示事物的普遍和抽象之美来培养想象力，但即便如此，在几个部分中也有大量的道德元素。第四，她是一位才华横溢的古代和现代文学评论家和散文家，从荷马和品达到丁尼生和夏洛特·勃朗特。特别是，她对当代女作家的敌意言论，让我们看到了当代人对维多利亚时代作家现在正在被重读和重新考虑的评价，也让我们从一个角度来看待她进入公共领域的文学作品中大胆和自嘲的混合。她的能量和智力是非同寻常的，她的版本受到了少数但具有文化重要性的观众的热烈钦佩。即使是她在1847年的《传记》中试图驳斥的德·昆西，也认为她的论点模式是无懈可击的。她的哥哥哈特利称赞她的《关于理性主义的文章》(收录在《反思的辅助书》中)是一个奇迹。我不是说一个女人的作品是一个奇迹--本来可以写它的男人住在哪里？自从我们的父亲去世后，英国没有一个。一个世纪后，埃德蒙·布伦登“怀疑在英国女性中是否还能找到更优秀的哲学家(或推理者)”。在没有这些性别限制的情况下，她理应与密尔和纽曼一起被视为维多利亚时代早期最强大的哲学思想家之一。这里的很多材料都是从手稿上印出来的。莎拉·柯勒律治是一位天生的作家。她有维多利亚时代的书信习惯，留下了2000多封书信。她也是一位多产的散文家，有时在她的信件中，有时在手稿文章中，这些文章虽然仔细完成，但似乎没有得到广泛的展示。她有毅力，她的大量写作表明她渴望被倾听，她意识到她有及时而有说服力的意见。这本书选自莎拉·柯勒律治完成的散文和私人信件，在这些信件中，她比想象公共收入时更犀利和自由地表达自己。莎拉·柯勒律治的文学批评目前几乎没有一本可以读到，除了维多利亚时代的版本，而且大部分从未出版过。继她的《诗集》(2007)之后，在AHRC的帮助下，我于2007年推出了《诗意思想的领域：莎拉·柯勒律治文学批评精选》，为我们提供了重新评估一位被低估的维多利亚时代重要作家的材料。

Between 1830 and 1850 women readers and writers made up the larger part of the literary world, and a woman literary critic, selecting and shaping the literary audience, was an important voice. ''The Regions of Poetic Thought': Selected Literary Criticism of Sara Coleridge' enables us to hear one such voice. She emerges as a critic of rare intelligence and theoretical reach as well as a lively commentator on her own times. Her critical contributions range widely. First, she was the polemical and scholarly re-presenter of her father Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a series of seminal new editions. This pioneering work has been highly praised by later editors and commentators, but has been very difficult to access: the present book represents her most important contributions to 'Aids to Reflection' (1843), 'Biographia Literaria' (1847) and 'Essays on His Own Times' (1850). Secondly, she was an exceptional critic of Wordsworth - both admiring and sceptical - over almost 30 years. Alongside her father, Wordsworth was the great formative figure in her creative life, and the foremost influence (ahead even of STC) on her own poetry. Thirdly, her letters are the best guide to her own increasingly admired poetry and prose fiction. In them she defends her children's verses and 'Phantasmion' against readers who thought they lacked moral design: 'the author's chief end and aim consists in cultivating the imagination by exhibiting the general and abstract beauty of things', she contended -- but even so 'there are plenty of morals in the several parts'. And fourthly, she was a diversely brilliant critic and essayist on literatures ancient and modern, from Homer and Pindar to Tennyson and Charlotte Brontë. In particular, her often hostile remarks on contemporary women writers give us a contemporary's assessment of Victorian writers now being reread and reconsidered, and also a perspective on the mixture of audacity and self-deprecation in her own literary entry into the public sphere. Her energy and intellectual capacity were extraordinary, and warmly admired by the small but culturally crucial audience her editions reached. Even De Quincey, whom she sought to confute in the 1847 'Biographia', regarded 'her mode of argument as unassailable' . Her brother Hartley praised her 'Essay on Rationalism' (included in 'Aids to Reflection') as 'a wonder. I say not a wonder of a woman's work - where lives the man that could have written it? None in Great Britain since our Father died.' A century later Edmund Blunden 'doubted whether any finer philosopher (or reasoner) can be found among Englishwomen'. She deserves to be seen, without these gender caveats, alongside Mill and Newman as one of the most powerful philosophical thinkers of the early Victorian period. Much of the material here is printed from manuscript. Sara Coleridge was a natural writer. She had the Victorian epistolary habit, and well over 2,000 letters survive. She was also a prolific essayist, sometimes in her correspondence, sometimes in manuscript essays which although carefully finished seem not to have been shown widely. She had stamina, and the mass of her writing suggests her appetite to be heard and her consciousness that she had timely and cogent opinions. This volume selects from her finished essays and from private letters in which she expressed herself more sharply and freely than she allowed herself when imagining the public ear.Almost none of Sara Coleridge's literary criticism can currently be read except in Victorian editions, and much of it has never been published. Following on from her 'Collected Poems' (2007), which with the aid of the AHRC I brought out in 2007, ''The Regions of Poetic Thought: Selected Literary Criticism of Sara Coleridge' gives us the material for a reassessment of an important undervalued Victorian writer.