Abstract
ABSTRACTWhile Coleridge’s 1817 Biographia Literaria has gained a reputation as a perplexing mix of disparate elements, this essay argues that analysis of Coleridge’s construction of genius in the text uncovers a consistent and pervasive concern with the early-nineteenth-century literary market. After bringing to light the ideological underpinnings of genius in the Biographia Literaria, the essay examines the function of genius, or the work that genius performs in the text. By pinpointing slippages in Coleridge’s depiction of a purportedly transcendent genius, the essay reveals the inescapable other present in this depiction: the reading public. Genius, for Coleridge, is not only an ideological construction privileging his preferred readings of author and text, but also a concerted response to the reading public and his position as an author in the expanding literary market. Close examination of the Biographia Literaria thus reveals Coleridge’s “practice” of genius in the unprecedented era of Romantic literary celebrity.
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