‘Two faces, each of a confused countenance’: Coleridge, De Quincey, and Contests of Authority

Thomas De Quincey exploits his rivalry with Samuel Taylor Coleridge to structure many of the key features of his most famous work, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821). De Quincey's idolization of Coleridge began early and survived the anger and disappointment he felt after the collapse of their friendship and his discovery of Coleridge's intellectual duplicity. In ‘Confessions’, De Quincey's accounts of himself as a scholar of Greek literature, Ricardian economics, and Kantean philosophy are all galvanized by his knowledge that Coleridge too has worked in these areas. As opium addicts, De Quincey's experience of the drug overlaps with Coleridge's in a number of ways, while De Quincey differs from Coleridge – at least on the surface – in his claims about both the moral implications of drugged euphoria and the resolve needed to defeat addiction.

On Not Being an Author: De Quincey's ‘Confessions’ and the Performance of Romantic Translatorship

Through his ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, Thomas De Quincey effects a meticulously crafted entrance onto the literary scene: less a series of confidential notes than a stage-managed performance, the ‘Confessions’ serve as a stage on which he announces his literary ambitions. One such set of performative acts has received little attention: it pertains less to establishing a ground from which to authoritatively create, than it does to laying down a structure through which to mediate. Acting on recent developments within literary criticism and translation studies, this article examines the ways in which the ‘Confessions’ launch their writer on a career in interlingual and intercultural transfer, and how this performance of minority is designed to operate alongside other Romantic writers. The article ponders the successes and failures of mediation on display in emblematic scenes, and attends to how these chart the uneasy relationship between authorship and translatorship.

Terror Recollected in Tranquility: The Oriental Gothic and the Sublime Imagination of Thomas De Quincey

This paper explores Thomas De Quincey’s seminal text Confessions of an English Opium Eater, examining the artistic vision of the writer and locating the author and his text within the context of the growing British Imperial project in the early 19th century. By locating the substance of his addiction, opium, within the economic, political, and cultural discourses that were developing in Britain at the time, this paper aims to deconstruct the ambivalent relationship that De Quincey, and by extension large segments of British society, had towards an imagined construction of the Orient. By analyzing the Gothic elements of De Quincey’s text, I argue that these images of the East are the signs of growing Orientalist discourse. They squarely locate Romantic tropes within the narrative of British Imperialism. In addition to exploring the fissured imagination of Asia that marks De Quincey’s work, this paper also briefly analyzes the psychological aspects of De Quincey’s contemplation of his addiction and presents a brief account of the role, opium played within the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. Through De Quincey’s opium-induced hallucinations, I attempt to analyze a mode of reflecting and presenting the sublime which was intrinsically linked to an imagined East that revisits the intersection of discourses of art, lived experiences, and the cultural and political anxieties of the era in which the primary text was produced to create a glimpse of the larger discursive function of De Quincey’s confessional memoir. This paper can thus be read as an intervention to re-engage with the links between Romantic aesthetic imaginations and the colonial enterprise of Empire building in the early 19th century.

Opium and the Romantics

Opium was an unremarkable part of daily life in Romantic Britain. It was highly prized by the medical community as a painkiller, and people of every age and class actively and unselfconsciously used it to treat a wide range of major and minor ailments. The Romantic age, however, also marks the crucial moment when British opium-eaters began to celebrate the drug, not for its medicinal powers, but for its recreational properties, as seen especially in the works of John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey.

Morte e Sonhos nas Confissões de Thomas De Quincey

Confissões de Um Opiómano Inglês é uma obra literária escrita por Thomas De Quincey, publicada em formato de livro no ano de 1822, sobre a experiência da dependência do ópio e a sua influência nos sonhos. Neste estudo, pretendeu-se explorar os relatos do autor à luz dos conceitos de pulsão de morte e compulsão de repetição de Freud e de alpha dream work de Bion. Este trabalho divide-se em três segmentos: recolha dos dados biográficos do autor, através da obra em estudo e de outros trabalhos biográficos; exploração da narrativa confessional e a sua análise; interligação dos dados biográficos e de análise da obra com os aportes psicanalíticos referenciados. Encontraram-se várias indicações, nas palavras do autor, de um funcionamento psíquico sob o domínio da pulsão de morte, em que a compulsão de repetição opera pelo reenactment da experiência traumática da perda originária. Pelo seu lado, a atividade onírica ficcional constitui uma tentativa mítica, secundariamente simbolizada em modo alpha dream work, de elaborar psiquicamente a experiência traumática passada e recorrente. Os sonhos parecem, de facto, reencenar o trauma originário de modo, por vezes, inovador e constituem, deste ponto de vista, uma tentativa intuitiva e ficcional de elaboração psíquica de elementos não mentalizados. Através da análise psicodinâmica de uma narrativa autobiográfica com quase duzentos anos, num certo sentido próxima da associação livre em setting analítico, foi possível explorar o funcionamento mental de uma personalidade, simultaneamente criativa e aditiva.

Opium

This chapter begins with Thomas De Quincey, who published a book in 1821 under the title Confessions of an English Opium Eater, an autobiographical telling of his “tortured love affair” with a tincture of 10 percent opium. It analyzes that De Quincey's Confessions confronted the West with a stark description of a novel concept: drug addiction. It also speculates that opium might be humanity's first drug as it was cultivated at the same time as agricultural civilizations developed alongside bodies of water. The chapter describes the opium poppy as one of mankind's earliest attempts at genetic engineering since it was planted as early as five thousand years ago in the western Mediterranean or the Near East. It looks at ancient texts that suggest that some civilizations were aware that opium resin was habit-forming and mortally poisonous.