Abstract
The literary culture of later Georgian England remained bound to traditional poetic diction and to the Augustan couplet even as politics and industry were changing the social landscape for ever, and with it the reading habits of an expanding public. Coleridge was trained to the traditional standard and chafed at the newer popular writing. His early reviews of gothic romances show him thinking about the fate of literature in this transitional period. Characterizing M. G. Lewis’s sensationalistic triple-decker, The Monk, on its appearance in 1796, he tried to put the tale’s popular appeal in perspective. Its fantastic excesses he took to be signs of the times.1
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Goodson, A.C. (1998). Language and Culture. In: Goodson, A.C. (eds) On Language. Coleridge’s Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26900-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26900-6_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-26902-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26900-6
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