"Can She the Bodiless Dead Espy?": Coleridge and the Hermeneutics of Ghost Seeing

Abstract: This article argues for a revised understanding of Coleridge's aesthetics of the preternatural by analyzing them through the lens of his long-standing engagement with the phenomenology and hermeneutics of ghost-seeing. Focusing first on critical works such as The Friend, The Statesman's Manual , and Coleridge's notes on Hamlet , I contend that Coleridge articulates an account of visionary experience which stresses the primacy of the interpretive act. The article concludes with a reading of Christabel as a meditation on the hermeneutics of apparitions in which the interpretive crisis of ghost-seeing facilitates a necromantic sociality interpenetrated by the presences of the dead.