Reception of S. T. Coleridge in Europe

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, philosopher and critic, a founder of British Romanticism, wrote with William Wordsworth the Lyrical Ballads (1798), which included his great poem ’The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. It was this work which was first to carry his reputation across Europe in many translations and through the rich illustrations by Gustave Doré. His poetry was received as late Romantic, visionary and symbolist, in later phases of European reception; he was known too as the translator of Schiller. His prose was known mainly in selections: chapters of his literary life Biographia Literaria; elements of his Shakespeare lectures; and other literary, political, philosophical and religious lectures, essays, and aphorisms, especially his brilliant Table Talk. In the last fifty years the Notebooks and Letters, and the recent Collected Works, have added to his stature at home and abroad. This collection of essays by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, records how Coleridge’s works have been received, translated and interpreted across Europe from his own time to today, and will contribute to the new recognition of one of the greatest of English poets, critics and cultural thinkers.

Edoardo Zuccato is Professor of English literature at IULM University, Milan. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Comparative Critical Studies and an editor-in-chief of the journal of poetry and translation Testo a fronte.

Elinor Shaffer, FBA, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, has published on Romantic and Victorian literature, is author of ’Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, edited the annual journal Comparative Criticism, and most recently has contributed to Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the Grain.