"Contest for Cultural Authority takes a fresh look at one of the scandals of literary history: William Hazlitt's harshly satirical reviews of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Regency press. Traditionally deplored as "malignant" personal attacks on a former friend, Hazlitt's eight reviews of Coleridge's writings between 1816 and 1818 engage such landmark works as Christabel, The Statesman's Manual, and the Biographia Literaria, harnessing the rising power of Regency review-criticism to devastating effect.

By taking seriously Hazlitt's own classification of these articles as "political essays," and by relocating them within the turbulent public debates of the late Regency, Robert Keith Lapp discovers in them an indispensable critique of Coleridge's conservative response to the post-Waterloo crisis known as the "Distresses of the Country.""--BOOK JACKET.