Thomas De Quincey: Selected Writings

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series presents students with an authoritative and comprehensive selection of Thomas De Quincey's (1785-1859) work, offering the most thorough and accurate annotation of his major works ever compiled. It includes complete versions of his three most famous autobiographical works, as well as manuscript material and an extensive selection from his revised version of the Confessions. The edition also features lengthy excerpts from his biographical recollections of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, as well as his finest pieces of literary criticism. An Introduction to his life and works and a Chronology enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these writings.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 672 pages
Publication date: 04 August 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

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.

Thomas 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 Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" (1823) and his two searching examinations of "The Literature Knowledge and the Literature of Power" (1823 and 1848).

The edition includes an Introduction to the Author, a Chronology of De Quincey's Life, an Annotated Bibliography of De Quincey's Writings, and an Index.

This volume will be of great interest to students of literature, history, and cultural studies, as well as anyone with an interest in the 19th-century British literary scene.

Weight: 680g
Dimension: 140 x 215 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192868046