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

1830年至1850年间，女性读者和作家在文学世界中占了很大一部分，女性文学评论家选择和塑造了文学读者，是一个重要的声音。《诗性思想的疆域：萨拉·柯勒律治文学批评选集》让我们听到了这样一个声音。她是一位具有罕见智慧和理论造诣的评论家，同时也是她所处时代的一位生动的评论家。她的批判性贡献范围广泛。首先，她是她父亲塞缪尔·泰勒·柯勒律治（Samuel Taylor Coleridge）的辩论家和学者，在一系列开创性的新版本中再现了她的形象。这本开创性的作品得到了后来的编辑和评论家的高度赞扬，但一直很难获得：这本书代表了她在《反思的辅助》（1843）、《文学传记》（1847）和《他自己时代的随笔》（1850）中最重要的贡献。其次，她是一位杰出的华兹华斯评论家，在近30年的时间里，她对华兹华斯既有赞赏，也有怀疑。华兹华斯和她的父亲一样，是她创作生涯中最重要的塑造者，对她自己的诗歌影响最大（甚至超过了STC）。第三，她的信件是她自己越来越受人赞赏的诗歌和散文小说的最好指南。在书中，她为她的儿童诗歌和《幻像》辩护，反对那些认为它们缺乏道德设计的读者：“作者的主要目的和目的在于通过展示事物的一般和抽象之美来培养想象力。”她辩称——但即便如此，“在几个部分中也有很多道德”。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Brontë。特别是，她对当代女作家经常充满敌意的评论，给了我们一个当代对维多利亚时代作家的评价，现在被重新阅读和重新思考，也让我们看到了她自己进入公共领域的文学作品中大胆和自嘲的混合。她的精力和智力都是非凡的，受到她的版本所触及的少数但在文化上至关重要的读者的热烈赞赏。即使是她在1847年的《传记》中试图反驳的德昆西，也认为“她的论证模式是无懈可击的”。她的哥哥哈特利称赞她的《理性主义随笔》（收录在《反思的辅助》一书中）是“一个奇迹”。我说，女人的作品一点也不奇怪——能写出这样作品的男人住在哪里？自从我们的父亲死后，大不列颠就没有了。”一个世纪后，埃德蒙·布伦登“怀疑在英国女性中是否能找到比她更好的哲学家（或推理家）”。在没有这些性别限制的情况下，她应该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。这里的许多材料都是从手稿上印下来的。萨拉·柯勒律治是个天生的作家。她有维多利亚时代写信的习惯，两千多封信流传下来。她也是一位多产的散文家，有时在她的信件中，有时在手稿中，虽然精心完成，但似乎没有被广泛展示。她精力充沛，她的大量作品表明她渴望被倾听，她意识到自己有及时而有说服力的意见。这本书选自她完成的论文和私人信件，在这些信件中，她表达了自己的观点，比她想象中的公众倾听时更尖锐、更自由。除了维多利亚时代的版本外，萨拉·柯勒律治的文学评论几乎没有一本可以读到，而且其中大部分从未出版过。继她的《诗集》（2007年）之后，在美国人权委员会的帮助下，我于2007年出版了《诗歌思想的区域：萨拉·柯勒律治文学批评选集》，为我们重新评估这位被低估的维多利亚时代重要作家提供了材料。

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.