Thomas De Quincey in the Context of Late-Romantic Intellectuals

Thomas De Quincey in the Context of Late-Romantic Intellectuals enriches comprehension of De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater” persona by interpreting it as a late-Romantic intellectual’s self-fashioning. This book revisits De Quincey’s ingrained literary image as “English Opium-Eater,” an image easily amenable to two academic approaches: one is aesthetic evaluation of opium hallucinations and reveries, and the other is revelation of imperial and colonial implications of opium. By reference to the transformation of Romantic men of letters into intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century and De Quincey’s career as a literary journalist between 1818 and 1858, this book argues that De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater” image promises the configuration of a late-Romantic intellectual. The main body has four chapters: the first chapter is a descriptive-analytical study of the definition and milieu of late-Romantic intelligentsia, with recourse to historical materials, letters, and related monographs; the following three chapters, through textual analyses of De Quincey’s numerous magazine articles, illuminate his self-fashioning into an intellectual that assumes the “Opium-Scholar” identity. This book is for researchers interested in British Romanticism and nineteenth-century Sino-British relationships, as well as postgraduates majoring in English literature.

Yingjie Duan is an assistant professor in English at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, China. He received his PhD in English Language and Literature at Beihang University, China, and was a visiting PhD student at the School of English, the University of Leeds (2022-2023). His major academic interest is English Romantic literature, particularly works of Thomas De Quincey. His latest publications include “De Quincey’s Self-fashioning into a Janus-faced Scholar in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (2026) in Orbis Litterarum, “Revisiting Thomas De Quincey’s Aesthetics of Murder: Irony and Sensation in the Periodical Press” (2024) in English: Journal of the English Association, and “On the Cyclical Movement in John Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” (2021) in The Explicator.