The great outburst of literary theory in the eighteenth century was instrumental in establishing literary theory in the nineteenth century as an area of intellectual activity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, more than anyone transformed both the status and the nature of literary theory. Arguing that questions about poetry and literature could lead to a structured system of assessment and judgements that had a validity that was different only in degree from that found in the physical sciences, Coleridge gave new authority to the "imaginative sciences".
The texts reprinted in this set cogently represent the emergence of literary theory as a new branch of literature.