"The Coleridge Legacy is the sort of book you read in graduate school and find overwhelming and a bit confusing, but when you come back to it years later you are grateful to discover a guide to what you had elsewhere read in a thousand places but never quite managed to put together. ... they certainly provide insights towards a fuller portrait of one of the most complex figures of the Romantic period." (Jeffrey W. Barbeau, European Romantic Review, Vol. 32 (1), February, 2021)
"The Coleridge Legacy, is ambitious both in scope and perspective; it traces Coleridgean ideas across the Atlantic Ocean from England to America during a one hundred-year timespan. ... The book thereby manages a balance, restraint, and delicacy difficult to achieve in the labyrinthine world of Coleridge studies. It also helps to rehabilitate the figure of Coleridge as a steady and important shaping force in the resultant philosophical / educational systems of Britain and America in the one-hundred years following his death." (Dometa Brothers, The Coleridge Bulletin, Issue 54, 2019)
1. Introduction: The Elusive Legacy.- 2. The Sad Ghost: Coleridge as the Sage of Highgate.- 3. The Ruined Man: Coleridge's Posthumous Reputation.- 4. The Power of Criticism: Poetry, Aestheticism, and Literary Criticism.- 5. The Construction of Doubt: Reflection, Faith, and the Knowledge of God.- 6. The Endurance of Idealism: Ethics, Epistemology and the Self.- 7. The Religion of Politics: The State, the Church, and Political Economy.- 8. The Harmony of Society: The Clerisy, Liberal Education, and Idea of Culture.- 9. Conclusion: The Coleridgean Vocation.
Philip Aherne read English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford, UK. He has an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London, where he also studied for his PhD. This is his first book.