"Samuel Taylor Coleridge is remembered as a romantic poet. This reconsideration of Coleridge's thought and career not only demonstrates his importance as a philosopher but recovers romanticism as a political as well as an aesthetic movement. Pamela Edwards radically departs from classic theories of Coleridge's development and interprets his writing against the backdrop of a shifting political and social landscape." "Drawing on the ideology, rhetoric, and institutional theory at the turn of the late British Enlightenment, Edwards unearths the fundamental continuities in Coleridge's writing during the revolutionary period of 1794 to 1834, paying particular attention to the rhetoric of Coleridge's pamphlet and miscellaneous writings, the journalism of the Napoleonic years, his philosophical and ultimately political treatises within the contexts of his notebooks and letters, and his readings and intellectual friendships. What emerges is a clearer understanding of Coleridge's political philosophy and his contributions to the origins and ideology of British Liberalism."--BOOK JACKET.