Overview
- First publication to trace Coleridge’s authorial development across the length of her entire literary career
- Restores to full sight the achievements of a hitherto marginalized post-Romantic woman writer
- Examines the relationship between her work as STC’s editor and her original writings in the genre of polemical religious prose
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book presents a fundamental reassessment of Sara Coleridge. It examines her achievements as an author in the public sphere, and celebrates her interventions in what was a masculine genre of religious polemics. Sara Coleridge the religious author was the peer of such major figures as John Henry Newman and F. D. Maurice, and recognized as such by contemporaries. Her strategic negotiations with conventions of gender and authorship were subtle and successful. In this rediscovery of Sara Coleridge the author revises perspectives upon her literary relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Far from sacrificing her opportunities in service of her father’s memory, her rationale is to exploit his metaphysics in original religious writings that engage with urgent controversies of her own times. Sara Coleridge critiques the Oxford theology of Newman and his colleagues for authoritarian and elitist tendencies, and for creating a negative culture in religious discourse. In response, she experiments with methodologies of collaborative, dialogic exchange, in which form as much as content will promote liberal, inclusive and productive encounters. She develops this agenda in her major religious work, the unpublished Dialogues on Regeneration (1850–51), which this book examines in its penultimate chapter.
Reviews
“Upon reading Schofield’s illuminating book on Sara’s literary vocation as a religious author, it is simultaneously surprising and not that few scholars have taken up a study of Sara’s religious writings. … Schofield has brought Sara’s later religious writings to life as part of a lively Victorian religious debate that future scholars will find helpful as an introduction to Sara’s later work. This carefully researched book lays the groundwork for future study of Sara’s religious writings, especially her unpublished Dialogues.” (Anastasia Stelse, The Coleridge Bulletin, Issue 54, 2019)
“The book’s strength lies in its ability to perform close analysis on a number of Coleridge’s little-known and understudied works, combining this with a study of early-nineteenth-century religion. … Schofield’s book is a catalyst for future research, and demonstrates that further study of Coleridge’s life, letters and predominantly her works would be welcome.” (Amy Wilcockson, The BARS Review, Issue 53, 2019)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Robin Schofield read English at Lincoln College, Oxford, UK, before working as a school teacher. He obtained his PhD from Oxford Brookes University, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Vocation of Sara Coleridge
Book Subtitle: Authorship and Religion
Authors: Robin Schofield
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70371-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-70370-1Published: 23 February 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88928-3Published: 06 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-70371-8Published: 12 February 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 260
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, Fiction, Gender Studies