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9780820426327

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Tracing the interconnections of ritual, myth, and sacrifice manifest throughout De Quincey's introspective reveries and his social and political journalism, Schneider focuses upon De Quincey as instrument and agent in a larger and more complex mythic construct. For its effective analysis of Thomas De Quincey's works in the context of the human sciences, as well for the broader implications of the paradoxical interactions of myth and violence, Matthew Schneider's book is a major contribution to the study of one of the most provocative prose-writers of the Romantic era. (Frederick Burwick, University of California at Los Angeles oUCLA!) This is a provocative study, informed by a sophisticated anthropological understanding, of the second-generation English romantic whose 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' inspired Baudelaire's 'Paradis artificiels'. Schneider rightly focuses on violence that makes Thomas De Quincey a major figure in the breakdown of classical mimesis and the emergence of modernism. De Quincey's world is no longer the romantic utopia of the imaginary; as Schneider persuasively shows, the writer's fascination with murder, speed, and drugs are means of returning to an originary violence that he hopes thereby to control, but in which he inevitaby loses himself. (Eric Gans, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of French, UCLA)

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The Author: Matthew Schneider is an assistant professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, California. A specialist in Britsh Romanticism, he received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles.

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