World-Making through Imagination
Coleridge's Esemplastic Theory in Bridge to Terabithia and Pani Mar Raha Hai
Keywords:
Esemplastic imagination; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; constitutive imagination; Bridge to Terabithia; Pani Mar Raha Hai; reality; comparative literature.Abstract
This paper examines the constitutive role of imagination in shaping the protagonists' perception of reality in Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia and Amna Mufti's Pani Mar Raha Hai. While existing scholarship has explored these novels through theological, ecocritical, and symbolic perspectives, little attention has been paid to the ways in which imagination functions as a reality-shaping force in both texts. Drawing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of the esemplastic imagination as articulated in Biographia Literaria, this study employs a qualitative comparative textual analysis to investigate how imagination transcends its conventional role as a psychological or aesthetic faculty and actively constructs alternative modes of experiencing reality. The analysis demonstrates that imagination enables the protagonists to create symbolic worlds that provide emotional refuge, negotiate trauma, and redefine their engagement with the material world. In both novels, the boundaries between imagination and reality become increasingly permeable, allowing imagined experiences to influence characters' identities, choices, and understanding of loss. By placing an American children's novel alongside a contemporary Urdu novel, this study highlights the cross-cultural significance of Coleridge's theory and contributes to comparative literary scholarship by demonstrating that imagination operates as a constitutive force capable of reshaping lived reality rather than merely escaping from it.
References
Blake, W. (2002). Collected poems. Psychology Press.
Byron, G. G. (1835). The complete works of Lord Byron (Vol. 2). A. and W. Galignani and Company.
Coleridge, S. T. (1912). The complete poetical works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems (Vol. 1). Clarendon Press.
Coleridge, S. T. (1985). Biographia literaria. Oxford University Press.
Csupó, G. (Director). (2007). Bridge to Terabithia [Film]. Walden Media.
Ford, J. (1998). Coleridge on dreaming: Romanticism, dreams and the medical imagination (No. 26). Cambridge University Press.
Frye, N. (1961). Myth, fiction, and displacement. Daedalus, 90(3), 587–605.
Hassan, M. B., & Liaqat, A. (2023). Environmental criticism and Amna Mufti’s novel “Pani mar raha hai.” Zauq-e-Tahqeeq, 5(2), 177–184.
Khoosat, S. (Director). (2022). Kamli [Film]. Khoosat Films.
Mufti, A. (2020). Pani mar raha hai. Al-Faisal Nashran.
Paterson, K. (2015). Bridge to Terabithia. Penguin Random House UK.
Pyle, F. (1995). The ideology of imagination: Subject and society in the discourse of Romanticism. Stanford University Press.
Shelley, P. B. (1891). A defence of poetry. Ginn & Company.
Utomo, T. G. (2013). The meanings of the broken tree, river, and bridge in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia [Undergraduate thesis, Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris FBSUKSW].
Washick, J. (1999). Terabithian shadow: Death and Narnian theology in Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society, 23(4), 3–7.
Wilde, O. (2006). The picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford University Press.
Wordsworth, W. (1994). The collected poems of William Wordsworth. Wordsworth Editions.
Wordsworth, W., & Coleridge, S. T. (2003). Lyrical ballads and other poems. Wordsworth Editions.
