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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Kubla Khan: A Vision in a Dream & Christabel," Samuel Taylor Coleridge weaves together a tapestry of imaginative and lyrical prose that explores themes of nature, the supernatural, and the interplay between dreams and reality. Written in a fractured yet enchanting narrative style, "Kubla Khan" emerges from a dream inspired by a vision of the Mongol emperor, intertwining elements of the exotic and the mystical. "Christabel," with its hauntingly beautiful verse, delves into the complexities of innocence, desire, and the ambivalence of female power through its tale of the eponymous heroine and her dark visitor. Both poems reveal Coleridge's mastery of vivid imagery and inventive language, situating them within the larger Romantic movement as reflections of personal introspection and collective human experience. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), a pivotal figure in the Romantic literary movement, was heavily influenced by his own philosophical inquiries, the natural world, and the sometimes tumultuous workings of his own mind. The opium-induced state that inspired "Kubla Khan" exemplifies his pursuit of the sublime, while "Christabel" reflects deep explorations of folklore and Gothic traditions. Coleridge's relationships with his contemporaries, including Wordsworth and Lamb, provided a robust literary framework that fueled his creativity and innovative spirit. This dual collection is a must-read for those who wish to immerse themselves in the rich landscapes of imagination and the complex textures of human consciousness. It invites readers to ponder the intricate layers of meaning and inspiration behind Coleridge's work, making "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" essential texts for anyone seeking to understand the essence of Romantic poetry. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Kubla Khan: A Vision in a Dream & Christabel
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together two of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most celebrated poems, Christabel and Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment. Its scope is intentionally focused rather than comprehensive: it is not a complete poems or collected works, but a concentrated pairing that highlights Coleridge’s mastery of the visionary and the uncanny. By presenting these poems side by side, the volume foregrounds the range of his Romantic imagination—from narrative enchantment to dreamlike evocation—and invites readers to consider how form, voice, and atmosphere collaborate in his art. The purpose is orientation and immersion: to frame, not to exhaust, Coleridge’s achievement.
The texts included here are poems. Christabel is an unfinished narrative romance in verse, composed in two parts, while Kubla Khan is a brief visionary poem explicitly presented as a fragment. No criticism, letters, or essays appear in this volume, and there are no prose narratives. Readers should expect verse that draws on ballad traditions, medievalism, and richly musical language, rather than the apparatus of a comprehensive collected edition. The selection emphasizes dramatic storytelling through poetry alongside a concentrated lyric of imagination, offering two distinct yet complementary poetic modes within the single-author frame.
Both poems belong to the historical moment of British Romanticism. They were first published together in 1816, in a volume that also contained The Pains of Sleep. Their composition reaches back to the late 1790s and early 1800s, a period during which Coleridge was experimenting with narrative form, meter, and the depiction of visionary experience. Read in this context, the poems register a turn toward inwardness, sensation, and the suggestive power of atmosphere that helped define Romantic-era poetry. The present collection preserves that context by reuniting the two pieces whose early reception was intertwined through their publication.
Christabel unfolds as a tale set in a medieval household and its surrounding woods. On a night of uneasy stillness, the young heroine encounters a mysterious woman and brings her to the family castle, an act that unsettles the community’s spiritual and social balance. The poem’s narrative voice weaves suspense with tenderness, employing ballad-like cadences, archaic touches, and sudden shifts of tone. Its incompletion—two extant parts—intensifies rather than diminishes the effect, suspending resolution and emphasizing mood, contrast, and implication. The result is a Gothic-tinged narrative poem that explores innocence, power, secrecy, and the ambiguities of hospitality and trust.
Kubla Khan, by contrast, is a compact vision that imagines an imperial seat and a surrounding landscape of striking contrasts. Its lines move from architectural splendor to elemental energies, forming a pattern of containment and eruption that feels both ceremonial and volatile. Coleridge published the poem with a statement noting its fragmentary status and associating it with a dream, and the text’s abrupt closure preserves that aura of interruption. Rather than tell a story, the poem concentrates images and sound into a single, resonant act of imagining, inviting readers to experience the intensity and instability of creative perception.
Across their differences, the poems are united by concerns central to Coleridge’s art: vision and its limits, the interplay of innocence and danger, and the ways perception shapes power. Christabel stages the ethical tensions of welcome and vulnerability; Kubla Khan stages the aesthetic tensions of design and desire. Both works trace thresholds—between private and public, natural and constructed, waking and dream. These thresholds are not merely settings but engines of feeling and thought. By dwelling on unstable borders, Coleridge asks how language can represent the half-known and how imagination transforms uncertainty into form without claiming full mastery.
One of the strongest continuities is sonic. Coleridge’s lyric effects depend on stress, pause, and recurrence as much as on strict syllable counts. Christabel adapts ballad measures with flexible accentual patterns, producing a voice that is intimate yet incantatory. Kubla Khan compresses music into shifting rhythms and echoing sounds that carry meaning through tone as well as image. Alliteration, internal rhyme, and careful vowel play create textures that make the poems memorable when read aloud. The soundscape is not decoration; it is structural, guiding attention, creating suspense, and enacting the very processes of vision and recollection the poems describe.
These poems cultivate deliberate ambiguity. In Christabel, gestures and scenes resist single explanations, leaving readers to weigh evidence, intuition, and competing frames—spiritual, psychological, social. In Kubla Khan, the language approaches abstraction through accumulation, suggesting rather than explanatory telling. Fragment and incompletion function as aesthetic choices: they stage the experience of not knowing, not finishing, not resolving. That stance aligns with a Romantic interest in the sublime—feeling pressed beyond the grasp of clear statement—while keeping the poems open to multiple interpretive paths. The reader’s participation, through attention to tone and pattern, becomes part of the work’s completion.
