Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom - Walking With Euclid

"When Coleridge described the landscapes he passed through while scrambling among the fells, mountains, and valleys of Britain, he did something unprecedented in Romantic writing: to capture what emerged before his eyes, he enlisted a geometric idiom. Immersed in a culture still beholden to Euclid's Elements and schooled by those who subscribed to its principles, he valued geometry both for its pragmatic function and for its role as a conduit to abstract thought. Indeed, his geometric training would often structure his observations on religion, aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. For Coleridge, however, this perspective never competed with his sensitivity to the organic nature of his surroundings but, rather, intermingled with it. Situating Coleridge's remarkable ways of seeing within the history and teaching of mathematics and alongside the eighteenth century's budding interest in non-Euclidean geometry, Ann Colley illuminates the richness of the culture of walking and the surprising potential of landscape writing"--

List of contents

1. Coleridge walks: the measure of the landscape; 2. Lines of motion; 3. A geometric frame of mind; 4. Ars Poetica; 5. Youth and age: Coleridge and the shifting paradigm of geometric thought.

About the author

Ann C. Colley is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emerita at the State University College at Buffalo, New York. She has taught in Ukraine and Poland as a Fulbright Senior Scholar and is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She has written extensively on nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

Summary

Adding to Coleridge's already substantial role as a multifaceted intellectual of the Romantic period, Ann Colley reveals how geometry channelled and shaped his thought and his perceptions of nature, illuminating the richness of the culture of walking, and the unexpected potential of landscape writing.

Product details

• Authors: Ann C. Colley, Ann C. (State University of New York Colley, Colley Ann C.
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.03.2023
• EAN: 9781009271752
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0927175-2
• No. of pages: 205
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: poetry and poets, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form