ABSTRACT
Coleridge’s concise definition of “poetic faith” has become one of the most instinctive ways people in the English-speaking world qualify their phenomenological investment in fiction. After positioning the famous phrase with respect to Coleridge’s thought about what many at the time were starting to call dramatic illusion, this chapter contextualizes such discourse as a variation on much older “belief talk”—the idea, present since at least Aristotle, that some kind of belief is involved when reading novels and epics or viewing tragedies. The chapter concludes by tracing the phrase’s success—now more colloquial than scholarly—over the past two centuries.
