De Quincey's Romanticism

Margaret Russett uses the example of Thomas De Quincey the nineteenth-century essayist best remembered for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and his memoirs of Wordsworth and Coleridge to examine the idea of the ''minor'' author and how it is related to what we now call the Romantic canon. The case of De Quincey neither a canonical figure nor a disenfranchised marginal author offers a point of access to specifically Romantic problems of literary transmission and periodization. Taking an intertextual approach Russett situates De Quincey''s career against the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge; the essays of Lamb Hazlitt and other writers for the London Magazine; and discourses of ethics and political economy which are central to the problem of determining literary value. De Quincey''s Romanticism shows how De Quincey helped to shape the canon by which his career was defined.