First published in 2004. This study begins by surveying the field of modern hermeneutics. Noting its repeated crisis of self-legitimisation, it traces these to circular beliefs bequeathed by Romanticism that human nature is self-begetting, and can thus be known intimately and autonomously.
After providing a historical overview of how human nature had been understood, the focus shifts to the attack in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria on Wordsworth’s 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and to a reading of some key Romantic texts. It reads Coleridge’s famous...
First published in 2004. This study begins by surveying the field of modern hermeneutics. Noting its repeated crisis of self-legitimisation, it tra...