The Romantic Work of Genius: Author, Nature, Nation, and the “Genial Criticism” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores how genius in the nineteenth century simultaneously constituted both individual and collective national identity, helping to produce new forms of liberal democratic nationalist culture. It offers a Latourian interpretation of genius in terms of the kind of social work and connections that the term enabled. Genius became associated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with author, nature, and nation in ways that grounded new models of literature and identity in the supposedly transcendental truth of nature and in specific landscapes as “sites of memory.” This discourse of genius played a keystone role in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetic and social criticism, or “genial criticism,” which exerted a deep influence on Anglophone culture. The essay concludes by assessing the overall cultural politics of genius in relation to various categories of identity, especially gender, and by suggesting how the “romantic work of genius” continues to operate and hold power in our (post)modern societies today.