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.
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