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Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of ´the limit´ with contemporary force.

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Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction PART I: LANGUAGE, LONGINUS, EMOTION ´Violently Agitated by a Real Passion´: Longinus and Coleridge´s Effusions ´The Self-Watching Subtilizing Mind´: The Impassioned Self in the 1798 Fears in Solitude Quarto PART II: TERROR, BURKE, ETHICS ´Cruel Wrongs and Strange Distress´: An Ethical Terror-Sublime in ´The Destiny of Nations´ Chapter 4: ´My Soul in Agony´: The Terrors of Subjectivity in ´The Rime of the Ancient Mariner´ PART III: REPRESENTATION, KANT THEOLOGY ´Ye signs and wonders of the element! Utter forth God´: Divine Presence and Divine Withdrawal in the Natural Sublime ´What never is but only is to be´: The Ontology of the Coleridgean Sublime PART IV: CONCLUSION ´A Specimen of the Sublime dashed to pieces´: Sublimity in the Biographia Literaria and the Limbo constellation Endnotes Bibliography

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´Christopher Stokes finds in Coleridge´s dealings with the sublime a way into the patterns of his thinking, as they are articulated both in his poetry and in his philosophy. It is an impressive, ranging, perceptive account: the book takes on a subject that we thought we knew all about and discovers something new to say about it.´

- Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford University, UK

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Christopher Stokes is Assistant Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth

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