De Quincey's Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission

by Margaret Russett

Overview

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. Situating De Quincey's writing in relation to the "major" poets he promoted, as well as the essays of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and others, Russett shows how De Quincey helped to shape the canon by which his career was defined.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521030502
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #25
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.71(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"Russett's impressive study is a shining addition to a growing corpus of fine criticism devoted to a writer whose minor standing has paradoxically become the hallmark of his considerable distinction." Nineteenth-Century Literature

"...Russett's book is a smart, illuminating examintation of the role minor writing plays in the production of the Romantic canon." Romantic Circles Reviews

From the Publisher