Thomas de Quincey
New Theoretical and Critical Directions
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.0Thomas 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 Knocking0at the Gate in Macbeth' (1823) and his two searching examinations of 'The Literature Knowledge and the Literature of Power' (1823 and (1848). 0.
Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.
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What the reading experience may hold
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Nonfiction · Fiction
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Balanced tone · Measured pace
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
A good fit if…
Readers who want a thoughtful experience and enjoy noticing the connections beneath a book’s surface story.
This book's DNA
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A quick reading snapshot
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- ISBN-13
- 978-0-4158-7668-1
- Language
- English
- Edition record
- OL28748766M
A more thoughtful way into this book
This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.
Read for connection, not completion.
Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.
Three questions to carry with you
- Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
- Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
- How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?
Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.
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