A Modern Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits by Andrea Timar (review)

immediately to mind when reading Jayber Crow, but Bilbro convincingly shows that Jayber’s sense of care for his community deepens as he grows to understand his work within the Kingdom of God. And though work is an obvious aspect of The Memory of Old Jack, this novel stands out in Berry’s oeuvre as a failure to do good work from a place of love. Few readers have accurately described Berry’s honest depiction of Old Jack, who would seem, at a first glance, to represent Berry’s virtuous hardscrabble farmer, but actually is a moral failure, though his response to his failure is admirable. Although Bilbro meticulously analyzes Berry’s allusions to Dante, Milton, and the Bible, I was surprised that he didn’t discuss in more detail his use of the Georgic tradition, for example his essay ‘‘Poetry and Place’’ that surveys the English poetry tradition for less sentimental depictions of nature. Overwhelmingly, however, this chapter succeeds in bringing to the present day the marginal theological tradition in which Berry participates, while opening up Berry criticism for further serious theological reflection. What distinguishes Loving God’s Wildness from other studies on Christianity and nature in American literature is the way Bilbro reads these writers from a theological perspective, ‘‘as a way of respecting the integrity of their work’’ (16). Thus far, these kinds of studies have either glanced over the literary qualities or have siphoned ideas out of the works to prove a larger (and sometimes overreaching ) conclusion. Through respect for the distinctly literary attributes of the works covered here, this book will appeal to a more general audience interested in theology and American literature. At the same time, Loving God’s Wildness should guide ecocritical scholars seeking an alternative to the dominant materialist perspective. Lucas Nossaman North Little Rock, Arkansas A Modern Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits. By Andrea Timar. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. ISBN 978-1-137-53145-2. Pp. xi+ 180. $90.00. Coleridgean studies have taken a new direction within the last five years. Recent critics, such as Samantha Harvey in Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature (2013) and David Greenham in Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism (2012), discuss the transatlantic connections between Coleridge and his continental counterparts (chiefly Emerson)—both in Europe and America. Andrea Timar continues in this tradition but with a twist. Her study examines Coleridgean thought as a paradigmatic catalyst for not only transatlantic romanticism , but indeed modernity itself. In her new monograph, A Modern Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits, Timar provides a comprehensive yet thoroughly modern take on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ideology—winding religion, pragmatics, politics, and literary criticism together into a revolving gyre of superbly researched critique. Cultivation, Book Reviews 381 addiction, and habits comprise three equal parts of a complex paradigm—one which, as Timar patiently shows, informs much of the Coleridgean canon, in both prose and poetry. Ingeniously fusing New Historicist methodology with age-old Platonic and German Idealistic philosophical influences, Timar breaks new ground, reconceiving Coleridge not only as a supremely talented writer, but also as a deeply conservative cultural and religious thinker and early modernist. Timar refers to everyone from Raymond Williams, through Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Beckett, to contemporary British political and religious thinkers, to show that Coleridge has a modern legacy and that his work resonates in a series of different eras, including the twenty-first century. Accounts of Coleridge’s life may appear in biographies, but Timar does not repeat similar critical methods. Instead, she interprets Coleridge’s literary correspondences , seeking to map not just a personal and idiosyncratic ideologicalcultural continuum, but one that is all-encompassing—borrowing from the best impulses of the man himself to find the concrete universal, the naturally symbolic—that is, the tautegorical symbol that applies to society writ large. From German Idealist to Tory to religious apologist to cultural determinist, Coleridge’s intellectual movements set the stage for modern ways of viewing the world. Cross-categorical references to The Statesman’s Manual, Biographia Literaria, and Aids to Reflection create the context and provide the evidence for this transformative power. Modern voices, often of varying political and religious affiliation, o...