Description
The ongoing critical fascination with Thomas De Quincey and the burgeoning recognition of the centrality of his writings to the Romantic age and beyond necessitates a critical examination of De Quincey. In this spirit, ten of the top De Quincey scholars in the world have come together in this volume to engage directly with the immense amount of new information to be published on De Quincey in the past two decades. The book features wide-ranging and incisive assessments of De Quincey as essayist, addict, economist, subversive, biographer, autobiographer, aesthete, innovator, hedonist, and much else.
Table of Contents
1 ‘I was Worshipped; I was Sacrificed’: A Passage to Thomas De Quincey
Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
2 ‘Mix(ing) a little with Alien Natures’: Biblical Orientalism in De Quincey
Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
3 Brunonianism, Radicalism, and ‘The Pleasures of Opium’
Barry Milligan
4 ‘Earthquake and Eclipse’: Radical Energies and De Quincey’s 1821 Confessions
Robert Morrison
5 De Quincey and Men (of Letters)
John Whale
6 Wooing the Reader: De Quincey, Wordsworth and Women in Tait’s Edinburgh
Magazine
Julian North
7 De Quincey and the Secret Life of Books
Josephine McDonagh
8 National Bad Habits: Thomas De Quincey’s Geography of Addiction
Joel Black
9 On the Language of the Sublime and the Sublime Nation in De Quincey: Toward a
Reading of ‘The English Mail-Coach’
Ian Balfour
10 Chambers of Horror: De Quincey’s ‘Postscript’ to ‘On Murder Considered as
One of the Fine Arts’
Gregory Dart
11 ‘A Deafening Menace in Tempestuous Uproars’: De Quincey’s 1856 Confessions,
the Indian Mutiny, and the Response of Collins and Dickens
Charles Rzepka
