De Quincey’s Romanticism

Margaret Russett uses the example of Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenth-century essayist best remembered for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and his memoirs of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to examine the idea of the ‘minor’ author, and how it is related to what we now call the Romantic canon. The case of De Quincey, neither a canonical figure nor a disenfranchised marginal author, offers a point of access to specifically Romantic problems of literary transmission and periodization. Taking an intertextual approach, Russett situates De Quincey’s career against the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge; the essays of Lamb, Hazlitt, and other writers for the London Magazine; and discourses of ethics and political economy which are central to the problem of determining literary value. De Quincey’s Romanticism shows how De Quincey helped to shape the canon by which his career was defined.

• Exciting insights into Romanticism and its canon through study of a central but ‘minor’ figure • First study of De Quincey to address his ‘minor’ status and to connect this with the broader issue of canon-formation • Combination of theoretical insight and textual focus leads to alternative perspectives on the work of some of Romanticism’s major figures

Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Conversions: Wordsworth’s gothic interpreter; 2. Transmissions: composing The Convention of Cintra; 3. Impersonations: the magazinist as minor author; 4. Reproductions: opium, prostitution and poetry; 5. Appropriations: the counter-lives of the poet; Epilogue: minor Romanticism; Notes; Index.