The Infection of Thomas De Quincey
The Infection of Thomas De Quincey

Author: John Barrell

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1991-01-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780300049329

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Thomas De Quincey, best known for his book Confessions of an English Opium Eater, was a journalist and propagandist of Empire, of oriental aggression, and of racial paranoia. The greater part of the fourteen volumes of his collected writings concerns the history, the colonial development, and increasingly the threat presented by the Orient in all its manifestations--human, animal, and microbiological. This remarkable book, which is an account of De Quincey's fears of all things oriental, is also an extraordinary analysis of the psychopathology of mid-Victorian imperialist culture. John Barrell paints a picture of De Quincey as a happy family man, apparently at ease with himself and with the rest of the world, but in fact harboring and expressing the most ferocious and brutal denunciation of Orientals of all kinds and dreaming of exacting from them a terrible retribution. Barrell shows that throughout De Quincey's writings there is a repeated story of the murder or violation of a female victim--either within or outside De Quincey's family--by an oriental criminal This story finds its way into almost everything he wrote: the various versions of his autobiography, his novels and short stories, his biographical and critical writings, his essays on politics, history, and science. Barrell attempts to understand this European terror of the East by an approach that is both historical and psychoanalytic. In particular, he explores the relation between childhood anxiety and imperial guilt in a body of writing in which the fear of violence within the family is imaged as a fear of the oriental, and the private and the public, the sexual and the imperial, the feminine and the exotic are endlessly intertwined. This book will be fascinating reading for those interested in Victorian literature, in psychoanalysis and its relation to literature, in the history of imperialism, and in debates about the characteristics and effects of colonial discourse.

The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey-Vol. 1; With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg
The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey-Vol. 1; With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg

Author: Thomas de Quincey

Publisher:

Published: 2024-08-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789362094629

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The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey-Vol. 1; With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg, a classical book, has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2; With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg
The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2; With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg

Author: Thomas de Quincey

Publisher:

Published: 2024-08-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789362094803

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The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2; With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg, a classical book, has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

A Guide to English Literature
A Guide to English Literature

Author: F. W. Bateson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-04

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1351535447

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At first glance A Guide to English Literature may seem to be no more than a short bibliography of English literature with perhaps rather more extensive--and certainly more outspoken--comments on the principal editions, commentaries, biographies, and critical works than bibliographies usually provide. But it is something more: this guide contains long ""inter-chapters"" that provide reinterpretations of the principal periods of English literature in the light of modern research, as well as two final sections summarizing in unusual detail the literary criticism that exists in English and recent scholarship in the field. The purpose of this book, then, is to provide the reader with convenient access to a disciplined study of the texts themselves.This guide proposes itself as a new kind of literary history. The conventional history of literature has often tended to become a substitute for the reading of the literature it describes: the better the history, the greater the temptation to substitute it. The present combination of reading lists and inter-chapters cannot be a substitute for anything else. Meaningless as literature in themselves, they nevertheless provide the necessary preliminary information to meaningful reading. Since oddities of arrangement derive from these assumptions, the authors are not arranged alphabetically. Instead there are chronological compartments--with the divisions circa 1500, 1650, and 1800--in which authors succeed each other in the order of their births.This pioneering handbook is primarily a bibliographical laborsaving device. It is meant mostly for students and the general reader in that it stops where original research by the reader is expected to begin. However, the last chapter on literary scholarship is devoted specifically to the research specialist and provides indispensable equipment for the reader. There is also a general section on literary criticism which will be of use to all.