Sublime Coleridge

Sublime Coleridge focuses on the role of the Opus Maximum in explaining Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ideas about religion, psychology, and the sublime. This book is an introduction, a reader's guide, and an interpretation of this central text in British Romanticism.

“He is everywhere careful to locate his arguments within the context of previous critics. This is becoming a rare quality, but one which we as a discipline should insist on. Evans‘s book has important things to say about the roles of rhetoric and the sublime in the Opus Maximum, and in the process reflects more clearly than previous critics on the epistemology underlying Coleridge‘s arguments.” (Nicholas Reid, The Coleridge Bulletin, Issue 55, 2020)

'Sublime Coleridge is the first comprehensive study of the Opus Maximum, those surviving fragments of what Coleridge considered to be 'the principal Labour' and 'great Object' of his intellectual life. Focusing on key concepts in the Opus Maximum the will, divine ideas, the Trinity, the self, the sublime Evans carefully explicates the internal development of Coleridge's argument and knowledgeably relates that argument to the larger body of Coleridge's writings, both in prose and in verse. Sublime Coleridge will be welcomed not only by Coleridgeans but by all those interested in nineteenth-century British religious thought.' - Nicholas Halmi, University of Oxford

'The unfinished and only recently published Opus Maximum is the most difficult of Coleridge's works but it was in his view the most important. The first sustained analysis, Sublime Coleridge provides a welcome guide to its key concepts and rhetorical strategies, together with a thoughtful account of its relationship to other Coleridgean texts.' - H. J. Jackson, University of Toronto

Murray J. Evans is a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg.