This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridges later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the authors previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum, this study focuses on sublime theory and discourse in Coleridges other major prose texts of the 1820s: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829). This book thus ponders the constellations of aesthetics, literature, religion, and politics in the sublime theory and practice of this central Romantic author and three of his important successors: Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière.

Murray J. Evans is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Winnipeg and Retired Fellow at St Johns College, University of Manitoba, Canada. He has taught medieval literature and medievalism, Coleridge, childrens literature, Inklings C.S. Lewis et al., literary history, and literary theory. He is the author of Rereading Middle English Romance (1995) and Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum (Palgrave, 2012) and has also published essays on Malory and the Malory manuscript, Chaucer, Piers Plowman, Coleridge, and C.S. Lewis.

1. Introduction.- 2. Touchstones for Sublimity: Coleridges Lay Sermons (181617) and the 1818 Lectures on Literature.- 3. Sublime Boundaries of Belief and Unbelief: Coleridges Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824) and Julia Kristevas This Incredible Need to Believe (2006).- 4. Sublime Disintegration: Coleridges Aids to Reflection (1825) and Theodor Adornos Aesthetic Theory (1970) .-5. Sublime Politics: Coleridges On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and Jacques Rancières Aisthesis (2011).- 6. Conclusion: The Sublime in Coleridge, Kristeva, Adorno, and Rancière