Bringing together an exciting variety of approaches, the fifteen authors here direct attention to Coleridge's relation to the "sciences of life"--a term which embraces a much broader field than modern "science." Accordingly there are essays on Coleridge and the vitalist debate, political and social ideas, race theories, dissent, literary relations, and language, as well as on his relation to contemporary optics, chemistry, geology, anatomy, and medicine. Taken all together, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life marks a vital and exciting development in Coleridge criticism.