Thomas De Quincey and the language of literature: Or, on the necessity of ignorance

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 847-862

  Mcgrath, Brian ^a  

^a CLEMSON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950426048     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2007.0041     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop et. al., 21 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000-03, 2003)
2. All subsequent references are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. "Letters" can be found in vol. 3, pp. 39-97
3. and "Works" in vol. 16, pp. 332-64
4. This shift is identified by Sigmund K. Proctor in Thomas De Quincey's Theory of Literature, Language and Literature 19 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1943), pp. 107-47
5. See also John E. Jordan, Thomas De Quincey, Literary Critic: His Method and Achievement, English Studies 4 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1952), p. 38
6. D. D. Devlin, De Quincey, Wordsworth, and the Art of Prose (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 76-100
7. Robert Lance Snyder, "De Quincey's Literature of Power: A Mythic Paradigm," SEL 26, 4 (Autumn 1986): 691-711, 692
8. Jonathan Bate, "The Literature of Power: Coleridge and De Quincey," Coleridge's Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of J. B. Beer, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993): 137-50, 149
9. and Tim Fulford, "De Quincey's Literature of Power," The Wordsworth Circle 31, 3 (Summer 2000): 158-64
10. Frederick Burwick argues that the psychological ground persists: "De Quincey in 1848, no less than in 1823, was interested in how literature works on consciousness, how it reaches into the subconscious to stir changes in thought, feeling, and perception" (Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power, Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories [Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001], p. 1)
11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), p. 274
12. In The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth Century Writers (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), J. Hillis Miller suggests that, for De Quincey, "Conscious life begins at the moment when life is finished" (p. 17)
13. Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), p. 40
14. Hertz considers an essay by Thomas McFarland in which he attempts to take into account a year's worth of publication. Faced with the prodigious number of volumes to review, McFarland laments the flood of publication that "threaten[s] the very knowledge that publication purports to serve" ("Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century," SEL 16, 4 [Autumn 1976]: 693-727, 693)
15. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), pp. 97-126
16. Sara Hutchinson describes De Quincey's relationship to books in a letter where she reports that De Quincey's books "have literally turned their master & his whole family out of doors" (The Letters of Sara Hutchinson from 1800 to 1835, ed. Kathleen Coburn [London: Routledge, 1954], p. 209)
17. See Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 38-9
18. See also Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on "The Prelude" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Jacobus traces attempts by Romantic writers to manage books. She writes: "What De Quincey calls 'the language of books' troubles Romantic writers in much the same way that writing troubles them - because it uncovers aspects of their practice which their theories attempt (even exist) to repress" (p. 130)
19. On the historical development of literature in response to the proliferation of writing, see Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change, 1700-1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998)
20. On De Quincey's attempt to protect himself from the fragility and contingency of writing, see Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 298-308
21. See also Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995)
22. Most recently, Cian Duffy discusses De Quincey's concern that literary "power" is threatened by the rise of a new reading public in "'His canaille of an audience': Thomas De Quincey and the Revolution of Reading," SIR 44, 1 (Spring 2005): 7-22
23. Most readers of De Quincey's definition of literature in "Letters" ignore the rhetorical structure of the definition. Margarett Russett is an important exception. See her piece titled "Knowledge" in Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 169-76
24. See also Charles J. Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 34
25. Russett, De Quincey's Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 25 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 151
26. See also Paul de Man's reading of Heinrich von Kleist in "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleists Über das Marionettentheater," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 263-90