Robert J. H. Morrison

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859). The edition presents De Quincey's work in all of its rich variety, and offers the most thorough and accurate annotation of De Quincey's major works ever compiled.0Thomas De Quincey: 21st-Century Oxford Authors is the most comprehensive selection of De Quincey's writings published in decades, and includes all the essays that made him a major figure in his own age, and that give him a burgeoning relevance in ours. The volume features complete versions of his three most famous works of impassioned autobiography-Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Suspiria de Profundis (1845), and 'The English Mail-Coach' (1849)-as well as a great deal of manuscript material related to these works, and an extensive selection from his revised version of the Confessions (1856). It contains all three of his essays 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' (1827, 1839, and 1854), the first two instalments of which are brilliant exercises in satirical high jinks, and the final instalment of which is a graphic account of the notorious Radcliffe Highway killings of 1811. It features lengthy excerpts from De Quincey's biographical recollections of 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge' (1834) and 'William Wordsworth' (1839), both of whom De Quincey admired intensely, though his personal relationship with both poets eventually collapsed into bitterness and self-justification. It features De Quincey's finest pieces of literary criticism, including 'On the Knocking0at the Gate in Macbeth' (1823) and his two searching examinations of 'The Literature Knowledge and the Literature of Power' (1823 and (1848). 0.

A masterful biography of one of England & rsquo;s most notorious literary figures Author of the scandalous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey (1785 & ndash;1859) has long lacked a full-fledged biography. His friendships with leading poets and men of letters in the Romantic and Victorian periods & mdash;including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge & mdash;have long placed him at the center of nineteenth century literary studies. His writing was a tremendous influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and William Burroughs. De Quincey is a 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 & rsquo;s biography passionately argues for the critical importance and enduring value of this neglected icon of English literature.

This collection of essays throws vast new light on the most significant literary-political journal of the Romantic age. Its chapters analyse Blackwood's wide-ranging contributions on some of the most topical issues in Romantic studies, including celebrity, British versus Scottish nationalism, and the rise of terror and detective fiction.