A Modern Coleridge

the long version

"A Modern Coleridge presents Coleridge as an eminently modern thinker, whose works stage the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction, and habit. These, the book shows, all revolve around a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's idea of the 'human'. Rather than being interested in opium, A Modern Coleridge focuses on the phenomenon of addiction as a disease of volition symptomatic of a civilization in excess, posing a threat to cultivation, to the unfolding of Coleridgean 'humanity'. Habit is posited as a third term between cultivation and addiction, the human and the non-human; being constitutive parts of Coleridgean cultivation, good habits (as opposed to bad ones) turn the working of free will itself into an automatism. Engaging with philosophy, ethics, politics and poetics, A Modern Coleridge reframes both prose and poetry, including The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Dejection: an Ode, or The Eolian Harp"--