Coleridge's Notebooks and the Case for a Material Hermeneutics of Literature

In this essay, as my use of the term 'hermeneutics' indicates, I am concerned with the ways in which we read and interpret texts, and more specifically with the assumptions and conventions that govern our understanding of a particular kind of text, a writer's diaries, 'day-books' or notebooks. This particular application of the word 'hermeneutics'may be an unfamiliar one, since standard discussions of literary hermeneutics tend to take as their test