SOURCE: Wheeler, Kathleen M. “Coleridge and Modern Critical Theory.” In Coleridge's Theory of Imagination Today, edited by Christine Gallant, pp. 83-102. New York: AMS Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Wheeler examines Coleridge's narrative strategies, which undermine authority in his works and anticipate concerns associated with twentieth-century critical theories, such as those of Jacques Derrida.

I

While Coleridge may not perhaps have offered as radical or as apocalyptic an account of perception, literature, and criticism as Shelley and Blake, his notable influence on Shelley should alert readers to the innovative elements of his thought, which anticipates much that appears distinctive in recent theorizing about criticism. The tendency to associate Coleridge with conservative and traditional notions about criticism stems partly from a literal and unimaginative interpretation of his concept of organicism, though there are other sources for such a moribund reading of Coleridge as well. For example, the account of...