Coleridge, Shelley, and Transcendental Inquiry: Rhetoric, Argument, Metapsychology

Cloth hardcover, xvii + 155 pages. Ex-university library, stamped "discard"; an external stamp on the upper and lower page edges, a couple of labels on the boards, internal inventory and ownership markings. Pages are clean, bright, untanned, with unmarked text and firm binding. Gentle age-spotting affecting page edges externally. Sunned boards. Missing the dust jacket. -- Romantic thinkers wrestled with the problem of making language represent the unrepresentable - God, the psyche, ultimate truth - and this study explores how Coleridge and Shelley aligned rhetoric with argument in their attempts to articulate transcendence. -- The book begins with Coleridge's rhetorical theory, examining his privileging of symbol over allegory, his concept of "determined metaphor," and the tensions between rhetoric and philosophy in works such as The Statesman's Manual and Aids to Reflection. Burke's sublime and Freud's uncanny are brought in to clarify how figurative strategies shaped Coleridge's transcendental arguments. Turning to Shelley, the analysis investigates A Defence of Poetry alongside major poems (Queen Mab, Mont Blanc, Adonais, The Cenci, The Triumph of Life), showing how skeptical rhetoric consistently undermines transcendental claims in what Hodgson calls "rhetorical suicide." Freud's metapsychology, with its reality and pleasure principles, enables a comparative framework in which Coleridge's conservative, self‑preserving approach and Shelley's regressive, self‑destructive stance are mapped in a chiastic schema of Romantic transcendental inquiry. An afterword situates these findings within deconstruction, highlighting Romantic figuration as a precursor to modern arguments about truth, indeterminacy, and the limits of discourse. -- This study integrates close textual readings with psychoanalytic and deconstructionist frameworks, producing a systematic account of how Romantic language theorizes its own limits. The book endures as both an interpretive guide to Coleridge and Shelley's rhetoric and a transferable model for linking figural strategies to broader philosophical and psychological debates. -- Contents: Preface: Interrelationship of Rhetoric and Argument; 1. Rhetoric: Coleridge's Rhetoric of Allegory and Symbol; 2. Argument and the Rhetoric of Argument: Coleridge, Burke, and the Catenary Curve of Determined Metaphor [Determined Metaphor and Edmund Burke's Conception of a Sublime God; Determined Metaphor and the Rhetorical Structure of the Uncanny]; 3. Argument: Shelley's Defense against Poetry and the Freudian Schema of the Psyche [Ontology; Epistemology; Deception; Misdirection]; 4. Rhetoric and the Argument of Rhetoric: The Mistakes and Atonement of Shelley's Gloomy Passion; Afterword: Romantic Argument, Freud's Metapsychology, and the Deconstructionist Debate; Notes; Index.…