A provocative inquiry into lasting literary fame, the gifted writers who have achieved it, and the gifted writers who have not Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. Or . . . might there be other reasons that account for an author's literary fate? This original book takes a fresh look at our beliefs about literary fame by examining how it actually comes about. H. J. Jackson wrestles with entrenched notions about recognizing genius and the test of time by comparing the reputations of a dozen writers of the Romantic period-some famous, some forgotten. Why are we still reading Jane Austen but not Mary Brunton, when readers in their own day sometimes couldn't tell their works apart? Why Keats and not Barry Cornwall, who came from the same circle of writers and had the same mentor? Why not that mentor, Leigh Hunt, himself? Jackson offers new and unorthodox accounts of the coming-to-fame of some of Britain's most revered authors and compares their reputations and afterlives with those of their contemporary rivals. What she discovers about trends, champions, institutional power, and writers' conscious efforts to position themselves for posterity casts fresh light on the actual processes that lead to literary fame.

When readers jot down notes in their books, they reveal something of themselves--what they believe, what amuses or annoys them, what they have read before. But a close examination of marginalia also discloses diverse and fascinating details about the time in which they are written. This book explores reading practices in the Romantic Age through an analysis of some 2,000 books annotated by British readers between 1790 and 1830.
This period experienced a great increase in readership and a boom in publishing. H. J. Jackson shows how readers used their books for work, for socializing, and for leaving messages to posterity. She draws on the annotations of Blake, Coleridge, Keats, and other celebrities as well as those of little known and unknown writers to discover how people were reading and what this can tell us about literature, social history, and the history of the book.

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Coleridge's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by important criticism, letters, and marginalia - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic, and radical thinker, exerted an enormous influence over contemporaries as different as Wordsworth, Southey and Lamb. He was also a dedicated reformer, and set out to use his reputation as a public speaker and literary philosopher to change the course of English thought. This collection represents the best of Coleridge's poetry from every period of his life, particularly his prolific early years, which produced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. The central section of the book is devoted to his most significant critical work, Biographia Literaria, and reproduces it in full. It provides a vital background for both the poetry section which precedes it and for the shorter prose works which follow. There is also a generous sample of his letters, notebooks, and marginalia, some recently discovered, which show a different, more spontaneous side to his fascinating and complex personality. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This selection of Coleridge's finest verse, chosen from the acclaimed Oxford Authors critical edition, includes Fears in Solitude, Frost at Midnight, Kubla Khan, and both earlier and later versions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Volume 1 of 2. Coleridge's Shorter Works and Fragments brings together a number of substantial essays that were not long enough to require volumes to themselves, among them his "Theory of Life," "Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism," "Treatise on Method," "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit," "On the Passions," and "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus." To these are added more than four hundred other pieces, some of them fragementary, many of them previously unpublished, ranging in date from school essays of the early 1790s to a discussion of the bullion controversy in 1834. As might be expected, the subject matter includes literature and language, theology, philosophy, politics, and science, but in many less predictable topics (such as child labor laws, marriage, suicide, church history, the abolition of slavery, the state of the colonies) also appear. By gathering this material and presenting it in chronological order, Shorter Works and Fragments reveals the development and major characteristics of Coleridge's seemingly inexhaustible variety. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson, Professors of English at the University of Toronto, are the editors of Coleridge's Marginalia and Logic, respectively, in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series LXXV Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Coleridge is such a celebrity that many who have never read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" have a fair idea who he was, and yet the common impression of him is not flattering. He is typically seen as a youthful genius transformed by drugs and philosophy into a tedious sage. It is time for a change of image. A "Book I Value" offers a one-volume sampling of Coleridge's encyclopedic marginalia, revealing a figure more complex but also more humanly attractive--clever, curious, playful, intense--than the one we are used to.

This book makes a convenient introduction to Coleridge's life, the intellectual issues and contemporary concerns that held his attention, and the workings of his mind. The marginalia represent an unintimidating sort of writing that Coleridge famously excelled at (often in books borrowed from friends). "A book, I value," he wrote, "I reason & quarrel with as with myself when I am reasoning."

Unlike the complete "Marginalia" in six volumes arranged alphabetically by author, this representative selection is chronological and footnote-free, with a contextualizing introduction and brief headnotes that outline Coleridge's circumstances year by year and provide essential historical information. Our own cultural taboo against writing in books is slackening in light of new interest in the history of the book. It will be weakened further by the extraordinary and now accessible example of Coleridge, who was a remarkably shrewd but at the same time a remarkably charitable reader.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of the most versatile minds in European intellectual history, and a shaping influence in the development of English poetry. As a radical young poet in the years following the French Revolution, Coleridge collaborated with Wordsworth in "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) and was by turns dramatist, political journalist, lecturer and religious thinker. This edition includes his two most famous poems, "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", as well as such blank-verse `conversation' poems as "The Eolian Harp", "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight". Not least of the attractions of Heather Jackson's selection is the earlier version of the "Rime" which she presents in full, along with the later, better-known version. Demonstrating the diversity characteristic of Coleridge's work, from early politically-inspired sonnets, to an epitaph he composed for himself shortly before his death, this substantial collection is supplemented by an introduction and notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

From Pierre de Fermat to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Graham Greene, readers have related to books through the notes they write in the margins. In this pioneering book-the first to examine the phenomenon of marginalia-H.J. Jackson surveys an extraordinary range of annotated books to explore the history of marginalia, the forms they take, the psychology that underlies them, and the reactions they provoke. Based on a study of thousands of books annotated by readers both famous and obscure over the last three centuries, this book reveals the intensity of emotion that characterizes the process of reading. For hundreds of years, readers have talked to other people in the margins of their books-not only to authors, but also to friends, lovers, and future generations. With an infectious enthusiasm for her subject, Jackson reflects on the cultural and historical value of writing in the margins, examines works that have invited passionate annotation, and presents examples of some of the most provocative marginalia. Imaginative, amusing, and poignant, this book will be treasured by-and maybe even annotated by-anyone who cares about reading.

Volume 1 of 2. Coleridge's Shorter Works and Fragments brings together a number of substantial essays that were not long enough to require volumes to themselves, among them his "Theory of Life," "Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism," "Treatise on Method," "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit," "On the Passions," and "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus." To these are added more than four hundred other pieces, some of them fragementary, many of them previously unpublished, ranging in date from school essays of the early 1790s to a discussion of the bullion controversy in 1834. As might be expected, the subject matter includes literature and language, theology, philosophy, politics, and science, but in many less predictable topics (such as child labor laws, marriage, suicide, church history, the abolition of slavery, the state of the colonies) also appear. By gathering this material and presenting it in chronological order, Shorter Works and Fragments reveals the development and major characteristics of Coleridge's seemingly inexhaustible variety. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson, Professors of English at the University of Toronto, are the editors of Coleridge's Marginalia and Logic, respectively, in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series LXXV Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.