Is Coleridge philosophically interesting? His philosophical output was prodigious and remarkably untidy. His letters abound in comments and judgements on his philosophical reading; they document his current theoretical allegiances and his plans to publish them. His Notebooks, kept throughout his life, extend this activity into private areas safe from public accountability, showing a corresponding increase in adventurousness and ambition but fewer signs of decisions being taken and consistent positions being occupied. The fascinating Notebook entries are 'acts of obedience to the apostolic command of Trying all things' (CNiii, 3881). Early publications like the 1795 Lectures on Politics and Religion reveal a young intellectual engrossed by the possible philosophical justifications for radical sentiments in politics that he considers congruent with his religious beliefs. At that time those beliefs were Unitarian, mapped out in his poetry of the time (especially 'The Destiny of Nations') as a convergence of different knowledges appropriate to a God who shared his aspects amongst different religions. Unitarianism fitted with Coleridge's championing of intellectual enfranchisement, however sceptical he was growing of Jacobin enlargements of the political franchise in France. In the Prospectus to the Watchman in 1796, he equated communicative and political action, arguing that 'the forms of Government . . . are but the Shadows, the virtue and rationality of the people at large are the substance, of freedom . . .We actually transfer the Sovereignty to the People, when we make them susceptible of it' (Watchman, 4-5). This repeats ideas central to William Godwin's topical Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) whose idealistic rationalism must also have nurtured the transcendental tendency in Coleridge, as much as did his growing dissatisfaction with the Hobbesian psychology of empiricism popularised by John Locke and developed most exhaustively by David Hartley.

When it came to the power and influence of the daily press, and the crucial role of newspaper offices in supplying politicians with the latest intelligence, especially in war-time, Charles Stuart knew what he was talking about. One of a trio of entrepreneurial Scottish brothers who descended on London in the 1780s to make their fortunes in printing and publishing, Charles was firmly and lucratively ensconced in the pay of the Treasury, as was his brother Peter, proprietor of a ministerial paper and eager servant of whatever party was in power. The third brother was Daniel Stuart, editor-proprietor of the Morning Post, the daily London newspaper whose founding in 1772 has been described as one of the most significant events in the history of journalism. When Stuart purchased the Morning Post in 1795 its circulation had declined to 350 copies per day. Within three years, he had increased this to 2,000 copies per day, reaching an unprecedented sale of 4,500 copies per day in 1803, the year he sold it and bought the evening paper, the Courier. Coleridge wrote prose and verse for both of Daniel Stuart's newspapers, but his best efforts were for the Morning Post during its period of spectacular recovery, starting with poetry contributions in 1797 and rising to essays and leading columns in 1800. So successful were Coleridge's essays at this time, particularly his astute psychological anatomy of William Pitt (March 1800), that he appears to have been offered a proprietary interest in the paper (EOTi, lx).

Since the early 1980s, major developments have occurred in the way British Romanticism is approached and understood. We now read the literature of that period (1789-1832) with a greater consciousness of its political, economic and social contexts. The impact on British writers of the French Revolution and ensuing political movements has been more thoroughly investigated than ever before. New historicist criticism has taught us to understand how market-forces influenced the production and enjoyment of literature. Women's writing (as well as the work of various male authors previously judged to be 'minor') has come very rapidly to the fore, involving significant shifts in how we think about the canon.

As a consequence of all these changes, it would be unthinkable nowadays to design a course on British Romanticism based around the work of six male poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley; or even around a list expanded to include the great prose-writers of the age: Scott, Hazlitt, Lamb, Peacock and De Quincey. ‘What about Wollstonecraft, Austen, Mary Shelley?’, our students might legitimately complain if such a course were offered. (And what about Barbauld, Edgeworth, Godwin, Burke, Paine and Thelwall, one might rejoin; for the list of writers available for study grows longer every year.) The ‘Big Six’ go on being of vital importance, of course. But we now want to understand and appreciate their achievements historically and comparatively, not just according to the standards of taste which have made them classics for two centuries. This evidently entails diversification, both in the range of writers we teach, and in the disciplines and methodologies we draw on in our teaching. But it also calls for a reconsideration of the central figures who at one time constituted the canon. For, if the meaning of the word ‘Romanticism’ has shifted to accommodate a broader spectrum of texts and approaches, then it follows that the contribution made by each individual Romantic writer asks also to be reappraised.

One of the great frustrations for the student of Coleridge arises from the fleeting quality of his literary achievement, its inconsistency, patchiness and fragmentation. The voice which animates the finest of the 'Conversation' poems or the power which makes the supernatural poems so compelling are all too easily lost in the rest of his poetic output; some of his finest theoretical writing threatens to dissolve under scrutiny into a tissue of plagiarism; and much of the remaining political, religious and philosophical prose seems to waver between the doctrinaire and the arcane. As one of his most perceptive critics has put it, 'he is eccentric, even peripheral, his texts a circle whose centre is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere'. In a curious way, the Notebooks offer one answer to these frustrations, giving free play to the very qualities that are elsewhere most problematic: a naturally fragmentary form, infinite freedom to digress, a licence to borrow from other sources, and an escape from the portentousness of his public figure into the realm of the private and the occasional. Here the great talker, lecturer and theorist writes without an audience (and the bombast into which it often tempted him). He creates in this form a private space, a site of secrecy and discovery, which offers a refuge from the anxieties and failures of the public sphere. In a fascinating generic hybrid of journal, travelogue, sketchbook and commonplace book, the Notebooks show us glimpses of a more humane Coleridge, and of his work in progress, in confessional, tentative or experimental mode.

In early March 1815, deciding what manuscripts, even older ones, might be fit for the press, Coleridge proposed to friends and publishers the project that would become Biographia Literaria. He had no intention of producing a two-volume work, let alone a classic of humane letters fusing literary criticism, both deeply theoretical and brilliantly practical, with autobiography, philosophy, religion and poetry. Yet, for the final result, what Arthur Symons claimed in 1906 remains true: 'The Biographia Literaria is the greatest book of criticism in English, and one of the most annoying books in any language' (BL 1906, introd., x-xi). George Saintsbury, who wrote about literary criticism more comprehensively than anyone until René Wellek, stated simply: 'So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge.' Saintsbury avowed that if all literature professors were made redundant, and the proceeds used to furnish 'every one who goes up to the University with a copy of the Biographia Literaria, I should decline to . . . be heard against this revolution, though I should plead for the addition of the Poetics and of Longinus' (History of Criticism iii, 230-1).

In a copy of Sibylline Leaves (1817), Coleridge wrote on the page that began 'The Eolian Harp':

In Sibylline Leaves 'The Eolian Harp' was placed among 'Meditative Poems in Blank Verse' with poems we now call 'Conversation Poems'. George McLean Harper coined the term 'Conversation Poems' in 1928, borrowing the subtitle of 'The Nightingale. A Conversation Poem' and following the epigram from Horace to 'Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement': 'Sermoni propriora', 'more fitted to conversation or prose'. Harper described them as 'poems of friendship', since they were all written to a close friend, and included in the category 'The Eolian Harp' (Aug. 1795), 'Reflections of Having Left a Place of Retirement' (Oct. 1796), 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' (July 1797), 'Frost at Midnight' (Feb. 1798), 'The Nightingale' and 'Fears in Solitude' (both April 1798), 'Dejection: An Ode' (April 1802) and 'To William Wordsworth' (Jan. 1807).

After Coleridge's death it was hard to know how to come to terms with him. Those who had known him personally might be left with a sense of resonating marvel, as expressed in Wordsworth's tribute that he was 'the most wonderful man he had ever known'. Even Thomas Arnold, who as a neighbour in the Lake District would have heard about the troubles of Coleridge's domestic life in some detail, wrote, 'I think with all his faults old Sam was more of a great man than anyone who has lived within the four seas in my memory.' Hazlitt, among his many adverse criticisms, had described him as 'the only person I ever knew that answered to the idea of a man of genius' (Howe v, 167). De Quincey, in an access of enthusiasm, now termed him 'the largest and most spacious intellect . . . the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed among men'. This last was written in the immediate aftermath of his death, however, and omitted from the account in subsequent years, reflecting contemporary uneasiness and a tendency to look warily at heroes of the previous age.

The categories according to which Coleridge's various admirers and critics have represented him often appear irreconcilable: he has been portrayed, for example, as a radical Unitarian, a mystic, a theosophist and an orthodox Anglican with conservative leanings. Such descriptions sometimes reflect the nature of a critic's interest in a particular period of his life, or in one aspect of his thought and often as much evidence can be found to challenge as to support them. This is not only because of the complexity of Coleridge's evolving ideas but also because he was convinced that truth is revealed only by means of apparent oppositions, because of 'the polarizing property of all finite mind' (Friendi, 515n). Even his early lectures, given at Bristol, contained a mixture of radical and conservative views. However, the development of his thinking, when traced across the spectrum of letters, notes and marginalia, is coherent and cogent. It shows the close relationship between his current reading and the religious ideas and questions which preoccupied him, and also his vast erudition and rigorous power of analysis and argument. He was always unwilling to subordinate his critical faculties to dogma of any kind, whether that of revolutionary radicalism, evangelical 'bibliolatry' (see below) or established Anglican convention. For this reason it is likely that his work and moral character would have attracted criticism from one quarter or another even if his private life had been respectably regular and conventional, which it was not. Yet it was precisely this wide-ranging critical spirit, blended with an intense desire for truth, which gave his writing on religion such penetrative power and which influenced and inspired many of both his own and succeeding generations.

How might 'later poetry' be defined? Some of the expectations raised by this category were determined by W. B. Yeats in New Poems (1938), by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets (1944) and by Ezra Pound after the Pisan Cantos (1949). Previous determining instances are Tennyson's 'Flower in the Crannied Wall' and 'Crossing the Bar' and Hopkins's 'terrible sonnets'. Later ones include William Carlos Williams's Pictures from Brueghel (1962) and George Oppen's Primitive (1978). In all these instances, we see the poet summarising a career in writing as it reaches a (possibly) final stage, and setting truth down plainly. Style is radically simple - simple because of the pressure to be testamentary, radical because the stripped-down formulation rests on a lifetime dedicated to art. Beethoven's late quartets are frequently cited as antecedents, Rembrandt's late paintings and Cezanne's cut-outs as analogues, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet and Beckett's Stirrings Still provide examples in prose fiction. Composition under such conditions does not prevaricate because it has nothing to gain and everything to lose:

The influence we are concerned with is that of Don Quixote. Without question Cervantes would be remembered for his other works, his romances, plays, and especially the exemplary tales. But the legend of the man himself – his life of hardship and imprisonment, the loss of the use of his hand at the battle of Lepanto – would not be memorable if it were not for the appearance of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha in 1605 and its continuation, in defiance of a spurious sequel, in 1615. Part i was translated into other major European languages almost immediately, Part II thereafter. The completed work became not a staple of Western civilization but a renewable source of its literature.

The immense influence of the work is also remarkable for being twofold: even as Cervantes’ method offered a flexible model for realism in the novel, his runaway hero, the self-created Don Quixote, became the model of rare heroism in the face of mundane reality. Both resources, the Cervantine method and the quixotic hero, have become closely associated with realism in the novel but need not be invoked in the same text. In truth, allegiances to the method and to the hero have generally been divided, as novelists and their critics have been engaged with the formal and philosophical problems of realism or with justice – not justice as a sustainable achievement, if there is such a thing, but as an ardent desire. Only very exceptional novels, original in their own right, draw upon both lessons from Cervantes.

During the last months of 1569, the twenty-two year-old Cervantes travels to Italy and enters the service of the soon-to-be Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva in Rome. Italian sojourns were almost de rigueur for Spanish poets, writers of prose fiction, and humanists during the early modern period. Cervantes' voyage, then, resembled the ones of Acuña, Aldana, the brothers Argensola, Cetina, Figueroa, Garcilaso, Hurtado de Mendoza, Medrano, Santillana, and Villamediana. Such voyages were facilitated by the fact that the kingdom of Naples was part of the Spanish empire, while other regions of the peninsula were under Habsburg influence. Cervantes came to Italy after studying in Madrid with the Spanish humanist Juan López de Hoyos and after writing his first verse compositions, which imitated Garcilaso, using his metrical forms, adjectives, and themes. Cervantes' brief humanistic training, and his interest in Garcilaso, who was deeply influenced by the Italian Renaissance, prepares him for an Italian sojourn. While it is said that López de Hoyos taught Cervantes an Erasmism that was no longer tolerated in Spain, Rome would reveal to him the ecclesiastic pomp, ritual, and luxuriant majesty that the humanist from Rotterdam often criticized. It was also a Rome teeming with ruins, which impelled humanists and artists of the Renaissance to turn to archeological pursuits, to focus their attention on rediscovering antiquity, finding in the ancients “a powerful impetus to revive the contemporary world in light of its accomplishments.”

In two of his recent books on the canon, The Western Canon and How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom echoes numerous literary historians when he asserts that Cervantes and his contemporary, Shakespeare, occupy the highest eminence as “wisdom writers” and that the Spaniard's Don Quixote is the first and best of all novels. At the same time, Bloom notes that “No two readers ever seem to read the same Don Quixote, and the most distinguished critics have failed to agree on most of the book's fundamental aspects” (The Western Canon, 120). His words allude to the long-standing debate surrounding both authorial intent and readers' reception: is Don Quixote a fundamentally serious, philosophical work, or is it primarily a comedy? While Bloom is historically correct in arguing for Cervantes' novelistic genius, he is, as he himself admits, one of the Romantics who “see Quixote as hero, not fool; decline to read the book primarily as satire; and find in the work a metaphysical or visionary attitude regarding the Don's quest that makes the Cervantine influence upon Moby-Dick seem wholly natural” (The Western Canon, 121). Because of this debate’s continuing relevance both in Cervantine studies and the general history of the novel, any volume exploring the critical tradition surrounding Cervantes’ novelistic genius must address the topic that has critically subsumed many other themes and is of vital structural and thematic importance to Don Quixote: humor. At the same, it is essential to explicate humor’s paradoxical relationship to violence in the novel.

Humor is so fundamental to Cervantes’ conception of prose fiction that he opens his novel with a brief yet unmistakably explicit comic ars poetica. In the prologue the friend offers him the following advice regarding the effect his book should produce in the reader: “ And see, too, if your pages can make sad men laugh as they read, and make smiling men even happier; try to keep simple men untroubled, and wise men impressed by your imagination, and sober men not contemptuous, nor careful men reluctant, to praise it. ”

A colleague once remarked, half in jest, that prevailing impressions of Spanish culture in the English-speaking world are dominated by two images: Don Quixote and the Spanish Inquisition. The image of the Inquisition has been reinforced from many angles, not least among which is a Monty Python comedy routine wherein absurdly garbed Inquisitorial figures issue strings of mock-harsh injunctions but manage only to stumble over their own commands. The matter of Don Quixote is, to say the least, more challenging. It is the case of a wonderfully complex and beguiling text that has become reduced in the popular mind to the pencil-thin profile of its principal character, an errant knight of La Mancha seen tilting at windmills or towering precariously over his paunchy squire. As for Cervantes, we are faced with an author whose identity has become similarly reduced, either to this single text or, less frequently, to a sole physical mark - the hand that was maimed by gunfire in the battle of Lepanto. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “The Man Maimed at Lepanto” (“El Manco de Lepanto”), author of Don Quixote. Whether in spite of or because of these reductive encapsulations, images of Don Quixote the character, Cervantes the author, and Don Quixote the text have spawned a range of successors that are nearly impossible to characterize, from Flaubert's “female Quixote,” Madame Bovary, to the pop idealism of the 1965 Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, and from the richly orchestrated tone-poem by Richard Strauss, Don Quixote, to the infinitely subtle variations of Borges' most famous text, now also massively consumed, “Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote.'”

The title of this essay brings together two controversial yet crucial areas of study within Cervantes scholarship. The concepts of psyche and gender, as I apply them to Cervantes' works, encompass the literary representations of psychological complexes – such as the unconscious and the manifestation and repression of desire – and of the sex/gender system. Their dynamics permeate not only the author's fiction, but many of the assumptions underlying its major critical approaches. No reader of Cervantes can fail to observe his abundant examples of literal and literary madness, of visual and verbal illusions, and of fragmented and fractured selves. The multiple ambiguities in his fiction, as well as the appearance of numerous “deviant” women and their relations with equally anomalous male partners, open the literature to an increasing range of psychoanalytical and gender-inflected analyses. My purpose in this chapter, therefore, is to trace the emergence of psychology and gender as vital categories of analysis, to identify their critical function in Cervantes studies, and to investigate the intricate relations between them.

Since psychology and its applied methodology of psychoanalysis intend an investigation of the mind’s unconscious workings, psychoanalytical readings attempt to understand the verisimilar mental processes in fictional characters that sustain our interest and lead us to empathize with literary protagonists.

Known above all for his great masterpiece of prose fiction, Cervantes himself aspired perhaps more than anything to success as a playwright and a poet. In late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, drama and poetry were the two connected areas of artistic endeavor which dominated literary output and in which literary reputations were made. The sixteenth century had seen the rise of prose fiction but, although fiction yielded the century's bestsellers in the domain of the secular, the status of imaginative writing in prose was still uncertain in that it lacked the authority of the classics. One of Cervantes' chief concerns in his prose works was to adapt classical prescriptions for poetry - creative as opposed to factual writing - to the new genre, but the ultimate accolade he sought, the respect and admiration of the literary establishment, was still fully accessible only through the traditional channels. Cervantes' trouble was that in his intellectual conviction early on that poetry and drama must continue to observe the classical precepts, he was slow to understand that the new commercial theatre being pioneered by Spain's first great dramatist Félix Lope de Vega Carpio, which abandoned the constraints of neoclassical theory, could contrive to combine popularity with art. In chapter 48 of the Quixote the priest and the canon pour scorn on the contemporary theatre and the way it has sacrificed art to profit, and on the evidence of his Viaje del Parnaso (Voyage to Parnassus, 1614) Cervantes never lost his misgivings about Lope de Vega's popularizing, anticlassical influence on poetic activity in Spain.

When seen from the perspective of Don Quixote, the origins of the novel can appear unfathomable. Looking backwards from where we stand, it can seem as if Don Quixote always existed, or as if Don Quixote somehow had to exist. Such has been the force of its impact on literary history. Before Don Quixote, we can identify a variety of fictional genres, not without interest in themselves, but of relatively minor importance when compared with what the Quixote spawned. In the European tradition these forms include the chivalric romances such as Amadís of Gaul, to which Cervantes makes direct and repeated references, as well as fictional autobiographies of rogues such as the Lazarillo de Tormes, pastoral tales like La Diana of Jorge de Montemayor and L'Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro, and a number of Italian Renaissance epics, of which Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso is arguably the most important. In the still more distant literary past stand the archaic adventure romances, such as Heliodorus' Ethiopian History and the anonymous Apollonius of Tyre and, before these, the towering tradition of ancient epics written in verse. Some of these pre-novelistic genres were strong enough to exert a continuing pressure on literary history in spite of the novel's rise to a position of near complete dominance; as for others, the novel became their unforeseeable and incongruous continuation.

Cervantes launched his writing career in 1585 with the publication of La Galatea, an unfinished, and today unreadable, bucolic fantasy. Some twenty years later he would reassess this first fiction, during the scrutiny of Don Quixote's library, as inconclusive: “it proposes something, and concludes nothing” (i, 6). One thing this early work did propose was the importance of transatlantic poetry. La Galatea includes, among other classical furniture, a Muse who catalogues an impressive number of Spanish poets installed in “the faraway Indies.” Why this strange encounter between classical Arcadia and early modern America? The publishing date of Cervantes' first book coincided with what Fernand Braudel describes as a new “physics of Spanish policy”: “For in the 1580s the might of Spain turned towards the Atlantic. It was out there, whether conscious or not of the dangers involved, that the empire of Philip II had to concentrate its forces and fight for its threatened existence. A powerful swing of the pendulum carried it towards its transatlantic destiny.” Evidently Cervantes wanted to be carried there too. This essay, which discusses his lifelong preoccupation with the Indies, is divided into three parts. We begin with a biographical section, largely focused on Cervantes’ efforts to emigrate to the New World. This is followed by a survey of various kinds of American images found in his work, including their links to the Chronicles of the Indies. The essay closes with a look at two interlocking New World themes: Don Quixote as a “conquistador ” and the conquistadores as “quixotic. ”

At a critical point in his short story “La española inglesa” (“The English Spanish Lady”) Cervantes has to repatriate the heroine Isabela from London to Seville. Writers of romance conventionally handled journeys of this kind by supernatural means or by an authorial stroke of the pen. But Isabela would be taking with her a dowry of 10,000 escudos, and England and Spain were at war: how was she going to get home with the fortune intact? Interested readers can consult the text to see exactly how it was done, but the solution is a masterpiece of early modern capitalism involving a network of French merchant bankers acting on commission: one in London to take care of the cash and arrange the transfer; another to issue the documents in Paris to throw the authorities off the scent; and another to cash the cheque once Isabela arrives back in Seville.

This mixture of high romance and precise documentary detail is a trademark of Cervantes, and one of the reasons why it is important to try to understand, four centuries later, the relationship between his work and the world in which he lived. Reputation has transformed the historical Cervantes into a universal genius, independent of time or place; yet the very work which made his name, Don Quixote, is not only profoundly steeped in the social and economic reality of Habsburg Spain, but has anachronism as its central theme.