Introduction

The librarian responsible for the Gottingen collection of Anglo-American literature meets with varied requests and enquiries. In her 1974 biography, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium, Molly Lefebure even doubts Coleridge's declarations of hard work at Gottingen. Lord Byron holds the distinction of initiating perhaps the most widely circulated assessment of Coleridge's German tour. The undisputed fact that the Life of Lessing was never written is usually presented as the strongest evidence of the 'failure' of Coleridge's German tour. One of the reasons critics and biographers have found it difficult to assess the Gottingen period is the scattered and fragmented nature of primary sources—many of them in the German language. The 'Anglo-Germanic' paradigm attempts to rectify such shortcomings through its focus on the relationship between German influences and Coleridge. The chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.