The English opium eater: a biography of Thomas De Quincey

Morrison, R (2009) The English opium eater: a biography of Thomas De Quincey. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. ISBN 9780753827895

Official URL: https://www.weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk/titles/rob...

Abstract

Thomas De Quincey’s friendships with leading poets and men of letters in the Romantic and Victorian periods – including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle – have long placed him at the centre of 19th-century literary studies. De Quincey also stands at the meeting point in the culture wars between Edinburgh and London; between high art and popular taste; and between the devotees of the Romantic imagination and those of hack journalism. His writing was a tremendous influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, William Burroughs and Peter Ackroyd. De Quincey is a fascinating (and topical) figure for other reasons too: a self-mythologizing autobiographer whose attitudes to drug-induced creativity and addiction strike highly resonant chords for a contemporary readership. Robert Morrison’s biography passionately argues for the critical importance and enduring value of this neglected essayist, critic and biographer.

Item Type: Book
Note:

Published in USA by Pegasus, 2010.

Divisions: School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities
Date Deposited: 09 Sep 2019 10:46
Last Modified: 15 Aug 2021 09:53
URI / Page ID: https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/12622
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