Writing Time: Coleridge, Creativity, and Commerce

Abstract

The Romantic ideal of creativity elaborated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his introduction to ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816), in which he extols such experiences as solitude, inspiration, and an almost transcendental dissociation from the mundanity of everyday life, remains present in the contemporary consciousness as part of a shared mythology of creative practice. Rather than focussing on the psychological frameworks by which creativity is believed to be constituted, this essay centralises the material relations of creative practice, with particular attention paid to the experiences of creative writing time revealed in interviews with contemporary Australian novelists Isobelle Carmody, Kate Forsyth, and Lee Battersby. Drawing upon recent theories about the sociomateriality and cooperative frameworks of creativity, and Rita Felski’s elaboration of heterogeneous temporalities, this essay explores the possibility of understanding creativity in the field of writing not in terms of existence within or without the experiential boundaries of the Romantic ideal, but rather in terms of its operation within matrices of temporal relations that encompass the sublime and mundane, individual and collective, asynchronous and synchronous, creative and commercial.