Some works by Thomas De Quincey on line

Levana or our Ladies of Sorrow (1821)

Early Criticism on De Quincey

 

Some useful links

The Pleasures of Opium:http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/dequinc1.htm#deqpic

L'Opium à travers les âges

 

Criticism on De Quincey

The Brain's own Opium and the Palimpsest by Sadie Plant

The Introduction to De Quincey's Complete Works published by Pickering and Chatto

A review of a book by Charles Rzepka on "Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey" (by Daniel Roberts)
Excerpt: "[...] Drawing largely upon new historicist and ideological critiques of Romanticism as well as gift-economy theory, Rzepka's book sets out to invert the traditional perspective on De Quincey and to show how his apparently other-worldly existence was in fact predicated on the complex dynamics of economic exchange which constituted the world of nineteenth-century literary production.
In his Suspiria de Profundis De Quincey famously compared the human brain to a palimpsest, and his own writings, richly layered with recurrent motifs and tropes, have been similarly constructed in the critical tradition as being inherently and profoundly unified. Rzepka follows this familiar route of reading De Quincey's oeuvre as interlinked and largely coherent, positing the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater as the textual nexus for the opium-eater's lifelong cogitation on "the connections between literary power and the Sublime, between the Sublime and sublimation, between sublimation and gift-giving, between gift-giving and sacrament, between sacrament and sacrifice" (x). This list of topics and associations provides some indication of the sweeping scope of Rzepka's book, ranging through De Quincey's multi-layered texts in the pursuit of his argument. At the heart of Rzepka's argument is his working out of the relationship between De Quincey's theoretical notion of literary "power" and his desire to achieve freedom from material dependency. [...]"

Baudelaire, De Quincey et les formules digressives, étude de rhétorique, by Janis Locas.
Introduction: "Parmi les transformations opérées dans Les Paradis artificiels sur le texte initial de Thomas de Quincey, on souligne souvent la suppression de plusieurs digressions de l'auteur anglais. Dans son édition critique du Mangeur d'opium, Michèle Stauble-Lipman Wulf range "l'omission de digressions gratuites, décoratives (Note 1) " au nombre des modifications les plus importantes. Baudelaire lui-même, dans ses " Précautions oratoires ", exprimait sa répugnance pour les développement hors sujet et sa résolution de les épargner au lecteur : " De Quincey est essentiellement digressif [...] je serai obligé, à mon grand regret, de supprimer des hors d'oeuvre très amusants [...]¸ bien des dissertations exquises, qui n'ont pas directement trait à l'opium. (Note 2) " L'ajout, dans Les Paradis, de commentaires explicatifs, de jugements personnels, de notes introductrices fait cependant douter d'une aversion réelle pour la digression. À y regarder de près, le rejet de Baudelaire concernerait plutôt la forme particulière que prend la figure chez De Quincey, que la figure en elle-même. La longueur, la nature des excursions discursives de De Quincey, relevant presque de l'esthétique baroque, gêneraient davantage Baudelaire que le principe de s'éloigner provisoirement d'un sujet principal. Multiforme, revendiquée, métadiscursive, la digression atteint en fait, chez Baudelaire, dans le respect de certaines exigences classiques, un haut degré d'achèvement."

From Romanticism on the Net, a series of book reviews concerning De Quincey
[please note: the following links will lead you to a French language search engine. In order to find the whole reviews you will have to search in "Romanticism on the Net" for "De Quincey"].

Julian North, De Quincey Reviewed: Thomas De Quincey's Critical Reception, 1821-1994 (by Albert Morrison)
Excerpt: "De Quincey Reviewed is divided into twelve chapters, eleven of which necessarily concern his autobiographical writings, which have always been the centre of critical interest; a final chapter concerns De Quincey himself as critic and scholar. The discussion proceeds chronologically, and surveys nineteenth-century constructions of 'De Quincey as Ruined Genius' and Romantic autobiographer, before considering the reaction to his work by 'Aesthetes and Moralists' in the 1860s and 70s, and the dominant interest in him as 'Prose Stylist' in the 1880s and 90s. North then moves from early twentieth-century representations of De Quincey as 'Degenerate', 'Musician' , and 'Modernist', through the landmark essays of J. Hillis Miller (1963) and Robert Maniquis (1976), and to the deconstructionism of the late 1970s and 80s. The book concludes with the new historicism of the early 1990s, seen most flamboyantly in the 'unashamed sensationalism' (111) of John Barrell's The Infection of Thomas De Quincey."

Not "Forsworn with Pink Ribbons": Hannah More, Thomas De Quincey, and the Literature of Power (by Daniel Roberts)
Excerpt: "De Quincey's conception of the literature of "power" as opposed to that of "knowledge," has proved to be one of the most influential of romantic theories of literature, playing no small part in the canonization of Wordsworth. De Quincey's early acquaintance with the Lyrical Ballads was made through the Evangelical circles of his mother, who was a follower of Hannah More and a member of the Clapham sect. In later years, however, De Quincey repudiated his early Evangelical upbringing and wrote quite scathingly of the literary pretensions of Hannah More. This paper attempts to uncover the revisionary nature of De Quincey's later reminiscences of More and to indicate thereby the covert influence of Evangelical thinking on his literary theorizing. Far from absolving literature of politics, however, colonialist and nationalist imperatives typical of Evangelical thinking may be seen to operate within the spiritualized and aesthetic sphere to which literary power is arrogated by De Quincey. "

Margaret Russett, De Quincey's Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission. Cambridge
Excerpt: "In a vicious 1824 article on 'The Humbugs of the Age', William Maginn pilloried Thomas De Quincey as, among other things, 'a sort of hanger-on' with 'the lake school', and the notion of De Quincey as the disciple or imitator of Wordsworth and Coleridge has often attracted critical attention. In her new book, Margaret Russett extends and theorizes the notion of De Quincey's 'minority', and his various textual and psychological debts to the two older poets. As she notes, 'De Quincey's imbrication in the cult of self-sustaining poetic genius, on one hand, and the context of periodical writing and proto-professional criticism, on the other, situates him at a historical crux whose symptom, minority, is inextricable from our received narratives of greatness' (p. 2). In support of this argument, Russett explores a wide range of contemporary concerns, from the anonymous authorship of the Waverley novels to the Copyright Act of 1842, and she relies extensively on the theories of poststructuralism, or what she calls 'involuted analysis' (p. 7). The result is a book that casts sometimes striking light on the nuances and anxieties of De Quincey's texts, but which at other points distorts or obscures what De Quincey wrote, and why."

Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument (by Laura Norman)
Excerpt: "Coleridge's influence, which has been crucial in establishing De Quincey as a literary critic, has not until now received full critical attention. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts fills this void in his wonderfully exhaustive study, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument. In this book, Roberts maps out De Quincey's critical development by taking into account the nuances of Coleridge's influence, beginning with the impact of Coleridge's contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, De Quincey's meeting with Wordsworth as interpreted through his meeting with Coleridge, and his analysis of overlooked writing by De Quincey such as his essays on 'Style' and 'Rhetoric' that define his position as literary critic. Roberts makes full use of De Quincey's Diary of 1803, which provides us with images of characters he later develops as well as notions of language, such as the nature of 'poetic diction' that he later develops into critical theories. Roberts draws on these sources as well as unpublished manuscripts. He seeks to revise our understanding of De Quincey's literary career by looking at his relations with Coleridge primarily and then, Wordsworth, Burke, Kant and the Liverpool literary society of Roscoe to map out De Quincey's critical development with regard to political concerns of revolution, reform and colonial expansion. Roberts draws our attention to overlooked aspects of De Quincey's early politics and reminds us of De Quincey's role as a political journalist, as well as his position as the mediator of Kant in England after Coleridge. "

L'évènement De Quincey by Patrick Petit (published by Freud-Lacan.com, l'association lacanienne internationale)

Criticism on De Quincey by H.S. Davies.
Extract: "Coleridge described De Quincey's turn of mind as 'anxious yet dilatory, confused over accuracy, and at once systematic and labyrinthine'. These temperamental weaknesses, allied to the effects of drug-taking, help to explain why, for so many years, he suffered perpetual harassment and adversity [...] Mr. Sykes Davies draws attention to De Quincey's original observations on the nature and qualities of prose, and demonstrates how De Quincey's sense of the analogies of prose with music informs the most eloquent passages of the Confessions and of the Suspiria de Profundis."

More by H.S. Davies on De Quincey's :
style: "In a range of subject, De Quincey far surpassed Lamb and Hazlitt. To read his collected essays, even to-day, would be a liberal education of remarkable comprehensiveness. For it would include Greek literature and philosophy, much Roman history, German literature and philosophy, modern history and literature, politics and economics; even mathematics would not be wholly absent, for in his writings on economics he made some use of mathematical arguments and illustrations, along with others—such as the factors determining the price of a rhinoceros in the seventeenth century, or of a musical snuff-box on a steamboat on Lake Eyrie, entirely typical of his taste for oddities. This education, however, would be in many respects a little out-of- date. A century of scholarship, of philosophy, and of economic speculation has turned many of his essays into period pieces, of no more than historical interest. What has survived as a smaller body of writing, not very different from that of Lamb and Hazlitt: some literary criticism and biography, records of people and events he had known at first hand, and above all, autobiography. To-day, in fact, he is most readable in those writings which most involved his own experience. And it was in these that his literary achievement was the greatest".
Criticism : "De Quincey's literary criticism differs from that of Lamb and Hazlitt in that it was only fitfully directed upon the actual works, the writings themselves".
Opium, dreams and pain : "Quincey was the only one who wrote about his addiction openly, studying it with an almost clinical detachment. Indeed this air of scientific frankness, of a man laying his private secrets bare for the public good, was one of the ways in which he seems to have quieted his conscience and kept up his self-respect—and hoped to retain the respect of others".

"De Quincey's Suspiria de Profondis: the missing link recovered", from Oxford Notes and Inquiries.