ABSTRACT
This essay, as the title suggests, is a study of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan from a historically informed perspective beginning with a theoretical approach and then contextualizing the poem from various viewpoints. It illustrates the broad but actual historicist dimensions of the poem and explains and demystifies its textual magical elements responsible for its traditional account as an expression of imaginative and spiritual transcendence. The essay is introductory/explicatory in nature with extended examples drawn from a range of historical and cultural contexts—French Revolution, Napoleonic invasions, contemporary geological theories, (declining/rising) interest in the orient, travel literature, local Lake District landscape, religious (Biblical and Islamic) traditions, and other political and poetical works of the past and of the time, both by Coleridge himself as well as his circle—which have been precluded for too long by critics catapulted into what New Historicism considers powerful yet insufficiently critical academic practice. The article is an attempt to refute the reader’s Romantic ideology-oriented emotional identification with and absorption into the poem’s state of inward self-communing and show that the poem’s transcending power does in fact lies in its relevance to us through its situating itself amid a host of political and cultural objects and reflections. It demonstrates that the poem is indeed a product of social and cultural significance, acted upon/influenced by other texts, including some minor, neglected or underrepresented works and that it opens up an interesting space for a historically attentive cultural studies critic.
Keywords: Romanticism, Historicism, Political, Scientific, Oriental.