De Quincey's Disciplines

Drawing on a broad range of sources, De Quincey's Disciplines reveals the English Opium-Eater to be a more complex and contradictory figure than is usually portrayed. All too often pigeon-holed as a latter-day Romantic and psychedelic dreamer, Thomas De Quincey is shown here to have been aprolific contributor to the periodicals of his day, on subjects as diverse as astronomy, economics, psychology, and politics. Taking a theoretical, new historicist stance, Josephine McDonagh's innovative examination of De Quincey's less frequently scrutinized works recontextualizes De Quincey as a true interdisciplinarian, aspiring to participation in the major intellectual project of his time: the formation of new fieldsof knowledge, and the attempt to unify these into an organic whole.

Josephine McDonagh is a Lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Exeter.