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Coleridge's "The Raven" and the Forging of Radicalism
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 43, Number 4, Autumn 2003
- pp. 799-813
- 10.1353/sel.2003.0047
- Article
- Additional Information
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Read in the context of eighteenth-century and romantic forgeries and political verse fables, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Raven" (1798) appears as a serious literary hoax. Published during the controversy over William Henry Ireland's forged Shakespeare Papers, Coleridge's poem performs a playful metacommentary on literary forgery at the same time that it addresses contemporary political issues surrounding the French Revolution crisis. This article argues that "The Raven" forges in various senses: it counterfeits an existing text (by Edmund Spenser), and it also forms social, political, and linguistic meaning.