Overview

When Coleridge described the landscapes he passed through while scrambling among the fells, mountains, and valleys of Britain, he did something unprecedented in Romantic writing: to capture what emerged before his eyes, he enlisted a geometric idiom. Immersed in a culture still beholden to Euclid's Elements and schooled by those who subscribed to its principles, he valued geometry both for its pragmatic function and for its role as a conduit to abstract thought. Indeed, his geometric training would often structure his observations on religion, aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. For Coleridge, however, this perspective never competed with his sensitivity to the organic nature of his surroundings but, rather, intermingled with it. Situating Coleridge's remarkable ways of seeing within the history and teaching of mathematics and alongside the eighteenth century's budding interest in non-Euclidean geometry, Ann Colley illuminates the richness of the culture of walking and the surprising potential of landscape writing.

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9781009271752

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'Given how young many of the Romantics were when they first started demonstrating remarkable language and thinking skills, it seems a wise move for scholars to investigate their education in school and university, and to consider the poets' experiences following immediately upon leaving these institutions in their critical studies. Colley's book is a fine addition to this field of study.' Catherine Ross, The Coleridge Bulletin

Author Information

Ann C. Colley is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emerita at the State University College at Buffalo, New York. She has taught in Ukraine and Poland as a Fulbright Senior Scholar and is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She has written extensively on nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

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