'This breathing-house of mine'': An Analysis of the Respiratory Science that Informs S. T. Coleridge's Dramas with Reference to Twenty-First Century

This is an interdisciplinary project on the topic of breath and breathing in S.T. Coleridge's relatively unexamined dramatic works. The plays offer rich respiratory exchanges - in polluted, miasmic spaces of interior suffocation - and the project's methodology of mapping respiratory science, from historicist, medical humanities and data-driven perspectives, redefines Coleridge's place in the history of science. Further, Coleridge's dual conceptualisation of the material body overlapped with the intangible, insubstantial self provides a surprising and potentially transformative corollary to twenty-first century anxiety over breathable air supply and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).