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The Poetics of Space, the Mind, and the Supernatural in S. T. Coleridge

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The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins

Abstract

While Samuel Taylor Coleridge is remembered as a Romantic poet, much of his best and most influential writing—from his poems The Ancient Mariner and Christabel to his Biographia Literaria—participates heavily in the Gothic tradition. Moreover, these texts represent a significant innovation, helping to initiate the Gothic’s turn towards the inner spaces of the mind and the unconscious that would characterise Gothic from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. This chapter argues that the reasons for both Coleridge’s engagement with and innovative impact upon the Gothic involve his unique conceptions of proto-higher-dimensional space in which liminal states of consciousness like dreams and the imagination overlap with the supernatural world.

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Correspondence to Kirstin A. Mills .

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Mills, K.A. (2021). The Poetics of Space, the Mind, and the Supernatural in S. T. Coleridge. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_16

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