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FORGING A NEW HISTORICISM AVANT LA LETTRE IN THE ROAD TO XANADU (1927), John Livingston Lowes claimed that in his voracious consumption of voyage narratives prior to writing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge read "with an eye which habitually pierced to the secret spring of poetry beneath the crust of fact."1 Recognizing the poem as "a supreme crystallisation of the spirit of maritime expansion,"2 New Historicism has subsequently embraced the task of excavating the poem with an eye that pierces to the secret layers of "fact" beneath the crust of "poetry." History's quarried particulars, identified since the early 1960s, have ranged from (premonitions of) a slaver,3 "colonial expansion," "European racial guilt," the killing of a slave, and "abolition propaganda"4 to the pathogenesis and "material conditions" of yellow fever,5 the terror of impressment,6 "tremors of political faith," "political complicity,"7 misplaced jacobinism, national political guilt,8 and the psychodrama of Coleridge's own neuroses ("a projection, albeit an exaggerated one, of intellectual and emotional tendencies in himself").9 Each has been tailored with varying degrees of persuasiveness to the layered contours of "The Ancient Mariner. " In all of this, the ostensible-and not easily exorcisable- master-narrative of unthinking transgression, horrific castigation, compound penance, and compulsive restitution has retained its power both to accommodate and to contest historicist readings. Carl Thompson has emphasized that "The Ancient Mariner" is crucially "indebted" to what he terms the "scripts" of contemporary shipwreck narratives and the literature of "maritime misadventure."10 In this essay, I offer a new interdisciplinary reading of "The Ancient Mariner" that identifies the traumatic subjectivity of the Mariner-as-shipwreck-survivor as the very condition of the poem's narration. Further, I credit Coleridge with a remarkably prescient dramatization-an empathetic inhabitation-of a condition of trauma codified only in the late twentieth century: post-traumatic stress disorder.
i. Diagnostic Uncertainty
As the core event to be excavated in "The Ancient Mariner," naufrage (literally, the breaking of a ship) and its traumatic aftermath clearly represent a different order of "fact" from those already listed above. However, some of the critical methods I deploy will be recognizable to those familiar with materialist excavations of Romantic texts. At the outset, it is worth profiling the acute hermeneutic challenge posed by the poem. Interpretation is taxed by the poem's "sheer...